Living with rats

From Events in the Gents to Pop Up People

2012-02-02T14:00:00.000Z

You can imagine how people reacted. The idea of 'events in the gents' doesn't really bear thinking about.

Yet the anarchic enthusiasm of a bunch of people in Hackney to bring their local high street back to life says something about the way people care about their communities - even to the point of breaking into a boarded-up public toilet and reopening it as a 'pop-up shop’, a temporary space to showcase local talents.

The local council responded to this attempt to revitalise a bit of Britain's Victorian heritage with a Victorian lack of amusement, seeing the opening of the toilets as nothing but an inconvenience. The council wanted to demolish the toilets and build new shops; members of the local Clapton Improvement Society said there were enough empty shops already, and what was needed to support a vibrant new market was well-maintained toilets.

Events in the Gents is one of the more bizarre results of a campaign by residents and traders to bring life back into Chatsworth Road, a traditional east London high street. Within walking distance of the mega-mall at Westfield Stratford City! It offers a clue about how our high streets are to survive.

As well as the efforts of the improvement society, there’s a traders’ and residents’ association brought together with the help of Euan Mills, a local resident and urban designer. When the project started one in five shops were empty; now there’s a lively market that has even featured in Condé Nast Traveller, which wrote:

‘It’s a major hit…not only for its shopping pleasures but also for the days-of-yore snacks at What the Dickens, a gourmet coffee stand that’s manned by Victoriana-clad chaps who serve treats like devilled kidneys.’

Using social media and old-fashioned networking, Chatsworth Road traders and residents showed what could be done when people share knowledge, information and the will to make a difference. The problem now is how to manage the group's success and keep rents at levels affordable enough to maintain a diversity of independent businesses.

Events in the Gents and the Chatsworth Road market are the work of what Empty Shops Network founder Dan Thompson calls 'pop up people'. They are people who are prepared to experiment and take risks to inject activity and colour into our drab and declining towns.

They manifest what politicians and business leaders are often good at talking about but poor at doing: enterprise. And their enterprise often has public benefits many business people don't think about until they've made their millions.

As Dan puts it in a report launched today: 'Pop up people are truly entrepreneurial, even if their project is more about community then commerce.'

Dan talks about artists who are reviving empty spaces in Tooting Market in south London and Temple Works, a factory styled in the form of an Egyptian temple in Holbeck, Leeds. From Margate to Coventry and beyond, pop-up people are showing an imagination lacking in our clone town high streets.

A look at some of the facts and figures highlighted in Dan's report shows how much we need pop-up people. Empty shops are just the most visible reason, with 15% of our high street stores now vacant,

We have far more retail space than we need - 88m square feet built in the last 15 years in an unsustainable rush for quick gains. Four out of five supermarkets in the planning pipeline will be out of town.

You could add a fact that doesn't appear in the report, which is the recent prediction by property agents Jones Lang LaSalle that 50% of high street leases will come up for renewal by 2015. The chain stores which are already reducing the number of outlets as Internet shooting increases will pull out of more traditional high streets and concentrate on ‘prime’ locations. As they put it in an article for Property Week:

‘25% of high street and shopping centre leases are due to expire by 2013 and 50% by 2015... the next 24 months are likely to see a swift and dramatic playing out of this polarisation.’

As the prime minister prepares to respond to the Portas Review, we need to learn how to mobilise Britain's pop up people. But we need to match their entrepreneurship with an enterprising attitude among local authoirities, property owners and the large retailers - people who have the power to make places better but often fail to use it intelligently.

The idea of localism and the advent of neighbourhood planning creates an opportunity for local people to be much more assertive about the kind of towns they want. But there isn't much time - it really is a case of use it or lose it.

• Alongside the Pop-Up People report is a wiki explaining how to do it yourself and share learning with others, a film, and even some musical extras.

Who bears the burden of social value?

2012-01-30T22:11:00.002Z

Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted counts. The saying, so famous it’s been attributed to Einstein, probably originated with an American sociology professor called William Bruce Cameron in the early 1960s.

It’s apposite that a discussion of measuring value should start with a mistaken attribution. It can be fiendishly difficult to prove cause and effect. This is why accountants exercise such unmerited power: Enron and Bernie Madoff notwithstanding, the bottom line is that they decide the bottom line.

As the famous Robert F Kennedy speech I quoted last week made clear, the measures of value preferred by accountants and economists leave much to be desired. In fact much that is to be desired is left out of their reckoning. So moves towards more rounded assessments of value, such as the Office for National Statistics’ exploration of wellbeing, are important.

One of the more promising bits of progress in the last year has been Chris White’s social value bill, which has just passed its second reading in the House of Lords.

The bill seeks to make sure that public service contracts can be let to organisations that provide the greatest social value, not just the cheapest price, and that greater weight is given to economic, social and environmental wellbeing. It’s an attempt to allay fears that greater diversity in public services will simply result in a free-for-all for sharks and charlatans.

Who decides who's creating the social value?

It’s a brave step in the direction of counting what counts. Underlying this concern with social value is an awareness that the kind of price-driven policies encouraged during difficult economic times have knock-on effects, often simply moving costs down the line or passing the economic buck to other bits of the public sector.

The history of our parks and green spaces over the last 40 years is a case in point. Ten years ago the Urban Green Spaces Taskforce estimated that 30 years of cost-cutting and compulsory competitive tendering had left Britain’s parks £1.3bn adrift of the investment required just to stand still. The last decade has seen a concerted effort to put that right, but now money is tight again and green spaces are an easy cut.

In times like these it’s important to restate the value created by projects and activities that aren’t seen as non-negotiable essentials like the NHS. One way to do that is to measure social value, and over recent years numerous tools have been developed to gauge ‘social return on investment’. There has been huge progress in finding ways to create economic proxies for the social goods like health and wellbeing, volunteering opportunities and community activities.

But there’s a catch. The burden of proving social value can fall on those least able to bear it. Community groups are being increasingly asked to justify the worth of what they want to do, and to do so in ways that satisfy budget-holders and funders who want in turn to demonstrate worth to those who fund them.

As well as doing the hands-on work of creating social value, local groups are expected to develop enough number-crunching and research capacity to prove the value of what they do to any prospective supporter. Once again, it's the accountants who decide the bottom line.

A recent study for Greenspace Scotland is revealing. It found the tools for measuring social return on investment (SROI) were complex and cumbersome, and were difficult to operate without additional help.

'From the outset there has to be a recognition that SROI requires time, resources and commitment,’ the study found. 'Even with support, the SROI process requires considerable commitment and enthusiasm from community group members.'

It was also extremely difficult to measure deadweight (outcomes that would have occurred anyway), drop-off (declining results over time), attribution (what caused the outcomes claimed as achievements) and displacement (activities that were happening elsewhere but now aren’t).

Doing this kind of exercise in a robust way would place a Sisyphean burden on community groups; it wouldn’t be surprising if many prospective participants, faced with the challenge of continuously proving the benefits of their work, decided not to bother. At this point it becomes legitimate to ask how you demonstrate the social value of measuring social value – is it done for the benefit of the community, or so that funders can answer auditors’ awkward questions?

From the perspective of policymakers there are good and clear reasons to measure and demonstrate social value. But from the perspective of those creating the social value, the blessings look more mixed.

The challenge to ‘prove it!’ concentrates the mind. But it can be used by those with power and resources as a way of withholding resources and power from those who lack them. And as we’ve seen in the case of planning appeals for out-of-town shopping and supermarkets, those with capital and clout are far better placed to commission research ‘proving’ the social benefits they bring than those without.

So let’s applaud Chris White’s bill when it becomes law, and let's commission proper research to measure the social value of activities that haven’t already been well researched and where the answers are in doubt. But shouldn’t we make sure, too, that social value doesn’t become yet another hoop through which ordinary people have to jump in order to make a difference where they live?

Asking silly questions at Davos

2012-01-26T13:07:00.000Z

These are grim times. With the International Labour Organisation saying we need 600m new jobs worldwide, with the World Bank and the IMF warning of deepening problems, we need to know what our priorities are.

This week’s Davos World Economic Forum will offer one version of a future our leaders would like us to rally around. David Cameron called for bold leadership behind his approach:

‘We put forward an aggressive set of plans to get to our economy back on an even keel. £5.5 billion saved in the first financial year. Welfare bills – cut. The cost of government – cut. Public sector pay – frozen. The state pension age – increased.’

All in the name of getting our economy on track. But the results are those set out by the Resolution Foundation this week: as they put it, the squeeze on living standards is set to run and run.

And as they also point out, wages for the typical worker have been flat since 2003 – while the economy was growing. There is no reason at all to imagine trickle-down economics will work any better in depressed 2012 than it did in booming 2005.

Those savings in welfare, the cost of government, public sector pay and pensions won’t make a bean of difference to improve the lives of ordinary working people, even if they are tremendously reassuring for the better-off. So when ministers and opposition politicians focus on GDP growth as the benchmark for our performance, they’re asking the wrong questions.

They say that if you ask a silly question you get a silly answer. We need to ask the right questions. We could start by rewinding 44 years to Robert Kennedy’s speech at the University of Kansas in March 1968.

‘Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product...if we should judge American by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

‘Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.’

It’s a far bolder and more visionary kind of leadership that can look beyond deficits and GDP figures. It’s not one on offer at Davos. But I know which gets my vote.

Welcome to the world of Man Bites Dog

2012-01-22T23:32:00.000Z

Man Bites Dog is a fundamental law of journalism. Every wet-behind-the-ears junior reporter knows 'dog bites man' is not news because it happens every day.

Man Bites Dog, however, is enough to get the editor of the Back Street Bugle hurling his green eye shades across the room before yelling 'hold the front page!’ and furiously thumping his ancient typewriter,

The news-consuming public understand the Man Bites Dog rule. That’s why the stories most typically shared are (using Sunday’s BBC website as a random example), ‘Man did not notice nail in brain’; ‘Scotland’s secret artist mystery’; and ‘Schoolgirl sailor triumphs after battle with authorities’. In other words, the surprising, unusual or bizarre.

Politicians, though, disobey the Man Bites Dog rule. They take something outrageous and exceptional and use it to suggest a pervasive rottenness. Britain is broken, young people are feral monsters, and anyone claiming benefits is likely to be a scrounger, a cheat or a rogue.

Just look at the evidence, they cry. Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, fulminating against turbulent priests at the weekend in good Thatcher-era style, spluttered that there are people living in expensive houses claiming unemployment benefits.

Shouldn't the moralising bishops be more worried about Joe Taxpayer and working families who are ‘doing the right thing’? (Claiming benefits you’re entitled to, in Mr Duncan Smith’s book, would seem not to be the right thing at all).

Well, it wasn't that long ago that ministers were pointing to the fact that some people were getting more than £100,000 in housing benefit as evidence that the system was rotten. As it turned out there were about five of them. And that’s in the context of 4.92m people claiming housing benefit across the UK, financed by just under 30m taxpayers.

Politicians have always spiced up their speeches with anecdotes and examples, There's nothing wrong with that. But it becomes mendacious when an exceptional or exaggerated example is used to infer a generality. Remember Theresa May and the illegal immigrant allowed to stay because of his cat? She wasn’t making it up, she said. Except of course someone did make it up, and she repeated it.

Or take last week's pseudo-story about migrants, touted by two government ministers as evidence of a scandal because 371,000 people not born in the UK claimed out-of-work benefits at some point last year. It turned out that 98% of these claims were almost certainly legitimate.

In a big system - and it's hard to find one bigger than the tax and benefits system, which one way or another affects us all - there will always be abuses or anomalies, and the raw numbers will look quite large when you take them out of context.

But to argue that this requires a reform of the whole or justifies arbitrary cuts, such as the £26,000 cap currently proposed, is specious. It's like pretending we live in a world where men routinely go around biting dogs.

The smoke and mirrors of laissez-faire localism

2012-01-15T21:51:00.001Z

'Yes, Mr Shapps - I'm feeling better already!'

Imagine a health service where nobody bothered to share learning nationally or internationally about which treatments worked and why. Imagine a health service where it was considered entirely unnecessary to explore the causes of sickness, as long as local GPs and hospitals were given free rein to treat the effects.

Imagine a health service where there were no agreed standards of practice, no national resourcing and no way of knowing whether care in a hospital in Blackburn was any better or worse than in a similar institution in Brighton.

If that’s inconceivable, just take a hop along the road in Westminster from the Department of Health to the Department of Communities and Local Government, where this new approach is all the rage. Let’s call it laissez-faire localism.

Last November a parliamentary select committee produced a withering critique of the government’s paper, Regeneration to Enable Growth (see previous blogs here and here, and my evidence to the select committee here). The government’ has just published its response to the committee, which is to reassert the virtues of laissez-faire localism.

Faced with the criticism that the government’s approach was incoherent and failed to define either the nature of the problem, its causes or how any remedy was expected to work, ministers came up with the following statement:

‘At its core, regeneration is about concerted action to address the challenges and problems faced by the community of a particular place. It's about widening opportunities, growing the local economy, and improving people's lives. But beyond that high-level definition, it is not for Government to define what regeneration is, what it should look like, or what measures should be used to drive it. That will depend on the place – the local characteristics, challenges and opportunities.’

To stick with the health service simile, this is like saying health is about feeling well. But beyond that high-level definition, it’s all down to the patient and their local doctor. Illness is just something that randomly happens and how you deal with it depends entirely on your local circumstances.

When it comes to dealing with deprivation and disadvantage, Grant Shapps, the minister responsible (if that’s still a meaningful concept) asserts that local communities are ‘in the driving seat’ and catalogues the powers that have been devolved from Whitehall.

Devolving power is helpful, as are some of the new rights and initiatives listed in the latest iteration of the regeneration toolkit. I’ve argued for many years that governments need to trust local people to develop their solutions and give them greater powers to implement them. Real localism is about giving people the ability and resources to take action at local level.

But Mr Shapps is doing something else here, though the way it’s being presented is highly disingenuous. There’s a huge difference between delegating responsibility and abdicating it.

Laissez-faire localism doesn’t put communities in the driving seat. It leaves them to clear up the mess after others have driven over them. National and international market failures and the shortcomings of public policy are simply imagined away. Laissez-faire localism pretends localities are not interconnected, and it presents the results of national economic and social policy as purely local issues.

On the intellectual gossamer of laissez-faire localism are strung the hopes and aspirations of our most hard-pressed communities - communities that have borne the brunt of decades of economic change, frequently aided and abetted by central government.

Market failure and public policy failure are inconvenient truths, and the temptation to wish them out of existence must be irresistible. So Mr Shapps blithely passes the buck, even while market failure is happening on a gargantuan scale across the eurozone. It will lead to precisely the blight and deprivation that only a few years back would have had ministers running to announce regeneration strategies.

Mr Shapps would, and does, argue that the government is doing its bit. The regeneration toolkit lists all the scattergun initiatives sprayed out by central government over the last year and a half.

However there is no analysis of whether or how they will work together, how they are expected to achieve their objectives and how their success or failure will be assessed. Neither is there any serious acknowledgement of the context, which is a radical reduction of support to those areas most in need of regeneration.

In his defence Mr Shapps rewrites history, arguing: ‘We can't go back to the top-down, centralised system of the past which attempted to impose a one-size-fits-all approach to regeneration with little regard for the needs, circumstances and wishes of local people.’

There was plenty wrong with the regeneration initiatives of the past, but to say they were one-size-fits-all is at best a highly selective reading of the literature - if indeed the literature has been read at all.

In a global economy, it’s not only intelligent but essential for national governments to take an overview of the factors that lead to blight and deprivation, identify causes and consequences, and apply additional support where it is most needed - while at the same time promoting, working with, and responding to the local initiative and energy and knowledge of cities and citizens.

There is, thankfully, a foolproof and largely risk-free way for Mr Shapps to test the validity of his own thesis. If he seriously believes the government has no role in regeneration he should resign as a minister. By his own reasoning his job is redundant, and the salary could be more usefully spent on any number of local projects.

It's time to put the well back into welfare

2012-01-13T22:46:00.001Z

The Poor Law is the stuff of legend. It's what inspired the ire of Charles Dickens, the zeal of well-connected Victorian reformers, and the drive of politicians like Lloyd George.

Yet while the Poor Law is long gone Britain is a place where Poor Law attitudes prevail. Look at the government's triple defeat in the House of Lords this week and that might sound surprising. But then ask yourself why it was necessary and how much it will really achieve.

That's not to denigrate the intelligence and moral compass of many of the noble Lords who decided some of the provisions of the Welfare Reform Bill were a kick in the teeth too far for people who already find life hard enough.

Nor should we underestimate the achievement of everyone behind the Spartacus Report, a demonstration of what can be achieved when ordinary, apparently powerless people choose to work together to make their voices heard.

But let's take a look at the bigger picture. What started with some intelligent and ambitious proposals a few years ago from Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice to create a coherent benefits system has turned into an exercise driven by a desire to save money, as if the measure of our achievement as a society was how little we spend rather than how much we help.

That's the mentality of the Poor Law: not what difference can we make, but how little assistance can we get away with? Check out the speeches of some of the peers in this week's debates, and some of the reactions from government ministers, and you'll see how little has changed. Listen to David Cameron or Ed Miliband most of the time and you'll find a consistent unwillingness to depict benefit claimants as people who have something to offer and not just something to take.

Of course we all know or have read anecdotes of abuse and examples of fraud. But politicians and commentators have taken those examples and foisted on us the untrue and poisonous generalisation that these stories typify the lives and attitudes of those on welfare.

So we allow the Poor Law mentality to take over, and then make exceptions for people who suffer from cancer or particular kinds of disability, as if their circumstances make them unlike other benefit claimants rather than similar to them. And we congratulate ourselves for resisting particularly Draconian measures while failing to challenge the doctrine of 'less eligibility' - that help should be a last resort given to the desperate, and so humiliating that people don't ask unless they really have to. It may no longer be the law, but it's certainly the mood of a substantial section of the public.

The problem with our welfare state is not than it gives people handouts, but that it considers the job done with the handout. It is very poor at enabling people to live in ways that make the most of their circumstances and build their skills and capacity. Yet in places or individual circumstances where there's no immediate and realistic prospect of work, that kind of help is what's needed.

If you talk to people who live in poverty you get a very different view of what life is like. Oxfam and Church Action on Poverty have been doing so for half a dozen years using a model called the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, and have unsurprisingly found that when you have very few material resources in life, things like a home and security and certainty of income, even if the level of income is pitifully low, become hugely important.

People make trade-offs between security and extra income because they know that losing an insecure job or their home could tip them over the edge. Stress and loss of confidence can set off a vicious spiral of mental and physical health problems that reduce the likelihood of bouncing back.

The state doesn't have to be paternalistic or patronising in the way it provides help . The experience of the time banking movement shows how people in difficult life situations can improve their wellbeing through peer to peer networks. It's worked for people with head injuries in Hackney, mental health problems in Catford and in hostels in Cardiff. What's important is to provide the long term support and infrastructure to enable this to happen, rather than fostering an adversarial relationship that assumes claimants are trying to milk the system.

There are some signs that the government is ready to consider such approaches in its attempts to join up support for what it calls the 'most troubled' families. These initiatives are based on the understanding that it's actually better value (including better value for money) to help people manage and make the most of their lives rather than just punishing them when they fail.

The logic of support and making the most of what people have instead of judging them by what they haven't needs to replace the Poor Law mentality that is driving our welfare state into a blind alley of blame and hostility.

Another comeback for the big society: a case study in optimism?

2012-01-10T11:03:00.000Z

Soon there will soon be more episodes of the big society than of Star Wars. Like Star Wars, the big society’s narrative may eventually run out of steam; unlike Star Wars, it seems less likely to develop much of a cult following.

After being savaged by a cynical press and a jaundiced public, it might seem a surprise that there are people still trying to put a new gloss on the big society story. Yet there are, and it’s worth looking at what they have to say because it goes to the heart of some of the dilemmas in the interface between politics and social action.

Two particular papers stand out for me because they address the question of optimism and how we view human nature and human potential. One is from the conservative think tank, Policy Exchange, by the political historian Anthony Seldon; the other is for the Royal Society of Arts by the scarily intelligent Jonathan Rowson and colleagues.

Both see the big society as an essentially optimistic idea, in that it is based on a belief that human beings, all things being equal, are on a path of personal and social progress. They don’t go quite as far as to say that we are perfectible but they take the starting point that people need to be released rather than controlled.

Have we got the mental complexity for a big society?
Picture by April Gazmen

Rowson quotes prime minister David Cameron"s statement that he has 'profound faith in human beings' (a point he's been less willing to make in the case of, say, benefit claimants) and points out that this optimism, which underpins his statements about big society, is unusual for a conservative.

But both papers suggest the idea has lost its way somewhat, and the solutions proposed are interesting if we’re to take the idea of optimism about human nature seriously.

Professor Seldon says some fascinating things about how the big society story can be re-energised through a focus on 'goodness', trust, optimism and forward thinking. He draws extensively on the ‘learned optimism’ theories of psychologist Martin Seligman, describing how a focus on wellbeing can build personal resilience.

But ultimately he plumps for the old-fashioned call of political pundits for more leadership, harking back to Margaret Thatcher as his ideal. The way the big society is to be realised, apparently, is through a political programme driven through determinedly (ruthlessly?) from the centre.

Rowson, as befits someone working for the RSA, is more abstruse. His paper outlines the ‘psychological foundations’ of a more participatory and involved society, drawing extensively on the developmental theories of Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan.

The thesis here is that we need to find ways to improve our ‘mental complexity’ in order to put the ideals of the big society into effect. ‘The big society has been presented as a vision, but lacks a strategy,’ he argues.

But he goes on to make the point that most people don’t have the mental complexity to develop and balance the ‘key competencies’ of autonomy, responsibility and solidarity:

‘Given that the majority of people are not at the order of mental complexity which is implicitly called for, architects of the big society need to engage with this neglected perspective, and consider revising their decision-making and policy announcements appropriately.’

In short, this tends towards technocratic solutions: it suggests that the rest of us don’t know what we’re doing, at least not just yet. While I’m sure most of us can plead guilty to this, I’m less convinced it provides us with grounds for optimism, given the scale of the challenges we face to live sustainably, build community and create a good quality of life fairly shared by all.

Both Rowson and Seldon assert or imply that we need to look to leaders or experts for help in finding a way forward. Yet if the big society ideas have any value, it is in the conviction that ordinary people themselves can develop solutions to the problems they face.

That belief in the potential of ordinary people is where I see grounds for optimism, though not necessarily grounds for optimism about the big society. That optimism doesn’t lie in giving intellectual or philosophical assent to ideas about the self-generated perfectibility of humanity, but in the evidence that change is possible in a world characterised by contradiction and conflict.

Whether the big society will be part of such a narrative of hope remains to be seen. My view is that while it is too diffuse to fit a conventional political narrative, it has become too loaded with political baggage to be adopted by most of those who are serious about social change.

Nearly three years after its original launch, the big society has been helpful in opening up a debate about a process of change in which people take more responsibility for their environment and community and start to take action at a local level. But has proved poor at describing what that change might be and why it really matters, which is why it has been so vulnerable to the 'cover for cuts' accusation.

Neither political drive nor expert intelligence will create a climate in which ordinary people feel more able to make their communities better and more equitable places to live in, both now and for future generations. Instead we need to foster a climate where people learn from and with their peers in an environment of mutual exchange and support.

To do that, our narratives need to be populated with stories that show what is possible, and how change can be achieved by people who may not have reached optimal levels of mental complexity or, perish the thought, graduated from the Margaret Thatcher college of leadership.

For the political pundits and intellectual elite, that may mean getting out more. For the rest of us, it means listening to, weaving together and sharing the many stories of human beings who have woken up to the possibilities around them. That doesn't just happen: it needs to be generated, networked and curated in ways that are accessible and adaptable.

What gives greatest cause for optimism is not a theory or a programme, but inspiration and a helping hand. The challenge is to share and spread that inspiration effectively enough to create a multiplier effect, where each idea and connection breeds many more.

Who's up for an optimistic new year?

2012-01-02T23:01:00.000Z

For a few optimistic hours on New Year’s Day, I thought David Cameron had decided not to offer the British people a new year’s message. I nearly wrote a piece praising him for judging the mood of 2012 perfectly, by eschewing the opportunity to pound the public with platitudes.

Sadly this was one resolution the prime minister failed to make. Instead, while the heads of European governments tried to sound grim and statesmanlike in the face of financial crisis and public indignation, Mr Cameron did his best to sound like the captain of a public school rugger team, urging Britons to ‘go for it’ (whatever it is).

‘This will be the year Britain sees the world and the world sees Britain,’ he began, searching his rhetorical vault for a suitably Churchillian flourish. It didn’t really get better. Instead of the ‘safe haven’ trumpeted by George Osborne last year the best the premier could offer was ‘some protection from the worst of the debt storms now battering the Eurozone’.

He concluded: ‘I know that if we lift our eyes to the other side we have it in our power to come through this stronger, better balanced, focused on what this fantastic country does best.’ But without an understanding of what ‘the other side’ might be, and a sense of how to get there, celebrating what we do best is little more than nostalgia.

It will take more than the London Olympics to inject a bit of optimism into this mess. There aren’t many optimists around as we kick off the new year, and even fewer with a credible basis for their optimism. So where are we to get hope and direction for our economy and society?

Cleaning up after the crash: it takes more than a broom

The place to start, now the parties are over, is with a sober assessment of where we are. I’ve been reading Benjamin Roth’s diary of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Most of the time he seems bemused by the events unfolding around him and as he struggles to get by, he realises that those who are supposed to know better are just as lost. On 2 January 1932, in the depths of the depression, he writes:

The N.Y. Times yesterday has the usual new year predictions by business leaders. It was comical how each and every one refused to be definite. Last year they almost gave a date for the expected revival. The slump is now looked upon as though of infinite duration.

Turn to Sunday’s New York Times and you’ll find a clutch of economic experts offering their new year analysis for 2012. Although they believe the US is on the road to recovery, they’re far from sure. Their opinions are full of fears of European meltdown, hardship for millions of ordinary Americans, and greater worries ahead. As former Obama adviser Christina D. Romer puts it:

Over the next 20 to 30 years, rising health care costs and the retirement of the baby boomers are projected to cause deficits that make the current one look puny. At the rate we’re going, the United States would almost surely default on its debt one day.

Roth’s diaries continue long after the recovery has begun. But as he observes on Christmas Eve 1936:

It is hard to understand why, in the face of all this seeming prosperity, there are still about 8 million unemployed in the US.

By the autumn of 1940 he has come to the conclusion that only a few gain from an economy that thrives on speculation and risk-taking. Despite hankering after the opportunity to make his own fortune on the stock market, he observes:

... The inevitable result will be a group who will end up with a profit but the vast majority broke and disillusioned.

So where’s the cause for optimism, either in Roth’s assessment of human nature or the New York Times’ contemporary views? Given the less than spectacular record of economic pundits and professors, maybe we should look elsewhere for principles to guide our business, social and political activity.

Here are three that optimists could start with. The first is to focus on activities that build relationships of respect. By that I mean activities that involve building networks of support and mutual exchange, civic, commercial and social. Instead of waffling about us being ‘all in it together’, this starts with those who really are in it together.

You could call it building community. Look at the way WiganPlus is working to reward local people who take part in voluntary activity by teaming up with traders and the local council to offer ‘points’ (similar to Tesco’s Clubcard) that can be exchanged for goods and services, such as spare cinema seats or car parking. The idea is that business relationships are just part of a network of links that help people get by and encourage them to help each other.

The second is to build equality. As Benjamin Roth noticed, even the good times aren’t good for the poorest, and the bad times drive down the living standards of the worst-off even further (often as an entirely predictable consequence of policy). Welfare, not wealth, is the first casualty of austerity.

Equality comes not just through redistribution but through sharing. Sharing starts with the principle that even the have-nots are ‘haves’ when it comes to time, friendship, or kindness. It is the principle behind movements like Abundance in Sheffield, which shares out surplus fruit every autumn, and provides a place where people can share knowledge and skills in cooking and preservation. Equality is about valuing everyone as a contributor and participant, actual or potential.

The third principle, linked with the principle of sharing, is to build self-reliance. The major failing of the welfare state has been that it provides for people’s needs without giving people the resources to meet their own needs in future. The answer isn’t to force people into self-reliance by reducing support, but to use support intelligently to build self-esteem, practical skills, education and social networks. Community Links’ work on ‘early action’ with young families is an example of such an approach.

There are many more. The point is that optimism starts with actions that give us reasons to be optimistic, not with vague hopes of a better future somewhere beyond the Eurozone apocalypse. By choosing to work in a way that values and builds up others, we create reasons to be hopeful - and by choosing to hope that others will share those values, we create the opportunities for optimistic work.

Can your council be trusted with your high street?

2011-12-22T18:26:00.001Z

It’s enough to make you gag on your value mince pies. Barely a week after Mary ‘Queen of Shops’ Portas presented her menu of recommendations to save the high street, we learned that there are enough supermarkets in the planning pipeline to swallow every Tesco store in the country.

Analysis by property experts CBRE shows that if all the plans for new supermarkets currently in the pipeline are approved, the amount of supermarket trading space in the UK would rise by 50%. If that happens, we can wave goodbye to local resilience: we will be chronically dependent on a super-size food supply system dominated by four major corporations.

Picture by Jordi Martorell

Of course not every plan will be approved, and supermarkets prepare more applications than they need. But they have deep pockets and can afford to play Monopoly for real. The standard strategy is to put in a planning application and, if it is unsuccessful, make minor tweaks and keep resubmitting or appealing against the council’s decision until they succeed. Councils tend not to have the staff or resources to engage in this kind of trench warfare.

What’s more, supermarkets can offer the golden carrot of jobs. The bigger the store, the bigger the headline figure of jobs created - and what local authority would resist a promise to offer some of those jobs to long-term unemployed people?

Thus the myth of retail-led regeneration is woven and sold to planners and councillors. But at a time of falling household income, the money spent to support these new supermarket jobs is money that is not being spent elsewhere. Nobody measures this displacement, though - the spin is that the jobs and spending are all new.

CBRE, as a savvy organisation that knows which side its toast is buttered, presents this boom as not only the ‘only game left in town’, but as great news for town centres:

‘Aside from their local job-generating potential, an important attribute of grocers which is increasingly coming to the fore is their potent High Street anchoring characteristics.’

The key study people cite in this respect is one from Southampton University, thrillingly titled ‘Revisiting the impact of large foodstores on market towns and district centres’. Researched between 2007 and 2009, it suggests that people who visit edge-of-town supermarkets are also likely to visit shops in the town centre. It was commissioned by Tesco.

This idea of the supermarket as an anchor to the high street only holds good if what is on offer at the supermarket is substantially different from the rest of the town centre. As supermarkets increasingly diversify into everything from clothes to TVs, it might be truer to say stores only act as an ‘anchor’ for the few activities that don’t interest them or where there is no serious money to be made.

So who will present an alternative vision of a high street? It’s a role that should fall to the local council as the authority responsible for local economic, social and environmental wellbeing, acting as a voice for the whole community.

Yet too often social and environmental considerations are jettisoned in the scramble for anything perceived as creating jobs. Councillors are frequently advised that they don’t have grounds to refuse planning applications, and they begin on the back foot because their role is often to react rather than to make things happen.

This is where the idea of ‘town teams’ in the Portas Review could come into its own. By bringing local people, businesses, community organisations, councillors and council officers together to create a shared vision for the high street, it should be easier to resist predatory planning applications. Planning inspectors should have to show overwhelming reasons for overturning a town team’s recommendation.

Neighbourhood plans for town centres should specify that new developments should add to the diversity of activities and demonstrate how they will keep money circulating within the local economy. They should show how they will build social, economic and environmental wellbeing by sourcing goods and services from local suppliers and creating opportunities for independent businesses and community activity.

Some supermarkets may be able to do that, building a symbiotic relationship with independent traders and the local community. Where they can, they should be encouraged. But given that we already have an oligopoly where four major chains sell more than three quarters of Britain’s groceries, our councils should ask some very hard questions before feeding this cuckoo in the nest.

Why small is bountiful - and can change systems

2011-12-19T11:45:00.000Z

Two events last week cast a spotlight on one of the key issues as we try to navigate our way through recession and economic restructuring towards (we presumably hope) a better future: is there any point in localism when the issues we face are so massive?

You could take virtually any piece of political or economic news as an example, but i’ll take two events I was involved in: a talk by architect Irena Bauman for Incredible Edible Todmorden, and the Mary Portas review of the high street.

First, Irena Bauman’s talk. The author of How to Be a Happy Architect had an incisive critique of big-ticket boosterist projects where no thought was given to ongoing care, and which were done at the expense of neighbourhoods which continued to deteriorate.

The market in Haymarket Square, Boston, exists because
public protests stopped it being turned into an expressway

Hard times mean we need to discover thrift, traditional skills and the value of basic maintenance, she argued. ‘Temporary urbanism’ and pop-up projects could change people’s perceptions of place. Tiny spaces such as community gardens could become highly visible symbols of civic activity.

Speaking in Todmorden, where the public realm is being transformed by just this kind of spontaneous and people-centred intervention, Ms Bauman had a sympathetic audience. But most decision-makers, planners, project managers and political leaders don’t think like this.

Take last week’s Portas Review of the high street. It wasn’t long before the backlash arrived, and it’s been interesting to see the points that have been made.

There’s been a lot of stuff from particular interest groups who were disappointed that their specific recommendations weren’t taken on board. That’s par for the course. More interesting is the critique that Portas has been tinkering on the edges when what we really need is structural and systemic change.

There is a lot of validity to this viewpoint, expressed here by Neil McInroy. Town centres, he points out, are expressions of a much wider economy and cannot improve without reference to those wider circumstances. To make a difference you need to deal with the whole system.

I have some sympathy with this, because it’s clear that our economy needs rethinking on a very broad scale and that most of our leaders have not woken up to that, or dare not tell the punters what they really know: that we have entered an irreversible global shift of economic and political power, combined with unprecedented risks to natural resources, that will make the planet a very different place for the next generation.

The difficulty is that the more you deal at a macroeconomic and geopolitical level, the less human the solutions and interventions tend to be. And, as we have seen in both the Durban climate change negotiations and the continuing financial crisis in the eurozone, progress is painfully slow and often non-existent. To argue in favour of systemic interventions can - in practical rather than theoretical terms - be a process of delegating responsibility for change to those who have the greatest financial and political interest in preserving the status quo.

I recently read Michael Ward’s fascinating pamphlet [pdf here] about Beatrice Webb’s quest to end the punitive and inhuman Poor Law regime which confined paupers to workhouses well into the early years of the 20th century. She and her husband Sidney were leading lights in the quest for social reform; yet for all their lobbying and politicking, in took nearly 40 years from the publication of her famous Minority Report to the establishment of the welfare state by the Attlee government; and 100 years on, that legacy is under threat as politicians return to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Poor Laws.

Of course it is worth working for systemic change. But it is a slow and often unrewarding process. And it can be a dull, dehumanising one in which ordinary people often feel powerless to make a difference, and that plays to the self-importance and vanity of those who seek status in order to achieve public good, but end up contenting themselves with status.

That is why the making-do, the tiny interventions, the miniature expressions of ambition and aspiration and human spirit, are so vital. Like good theatre, art or literature, they show what can be. And they also help to make it happen, by demonstrating resistance and resilience, imagination and innovation.

That is why Todmorden is prophetic. That is why Irena Bauman’s critique matters. It’s why the Portas Review is a move towards a paradigm shift. In an international context, it's why people like Vaclav Havel stood head and shoulders above their contemporaries. And it is why I continually come back to the belief that small is bountiful - that by taking action and amplifying that action through sharing, change starts to happen.

Why I was won over by the Queen of Shops

2011-12-12T23:11:00.000Z

On a sleety December day in Wakefield or Wigan, Weston-super-Mare or Wisbech, a walk down the high street amid hard-up Christmas shoppers is a long way from most people’s idea of a good time.

Today Mary Portas, TV’s Queen of Shops and the retail guru appointed by David Cameron to revive our high streets, is delivering her verdict. Can our sad and declining town centres be turned around with a bit of stardust and glamour?

When the news came out back in May, I was a little sceptical. So what spell did the Queen of Shops weave to make me change my mind?

It'll take more than street furniture to change our high streets

The starting point was that I got involved in the discussion. I contacted a few people who I knew were doing good stuff in town centres because I thought the review should listen to people who are thinking differently. I wanted the review team to understand that high streets could become exciting places even for people whose idea of retail therapy is to get as far away from it as possible.

Within a few weeks I’d brought together nine organisations to submit evidence to the high street review. We called for the reinvention of the high street as a ‘21st century agora’ - a market for social interaction and ideas, not just for goods and services. We said the high street needs to be multifunctional, rooted in the unique talents of the local community.

A subsequent meeting with Mary Portas’s team suggested she not only understood what we were were proposing, but appreciated the extent of the challenge. By September I was feeling much more positive about the review’s prospects.

But there’s a mountain to climb. A weighty review of the evidence, published alongside the high street review and commissioned by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, shows how much has changed since out-of-town shopping burst onto the scene in the 1980s: as far as shopping is concerned, town centres are now a minority interest. Most of our retail floorspace is out of town and most shopping out of town or online.

A generation has grown up on the convenience of car-based supermarkets and retail parks, where everything is under one roof, the environment is safe and clean, and you know what you’re getting. As a team of academics recently put it, this has become ‘the hegemonic retail format’. It may be bad for the local economy and for the environment, but people aren’t going to suddenly change because someone says they should shop locally.

The good news is that the review has a recipe for a happier high street - and it’s one that echoes and builds on our suggestions. It’s to think of the high street as a social space, not just as a space to buy or sell. It needs to be a place that caters for all a community needs, from civic facilities such as libraries and learning centres to parks and green space, entertainment and culture, and places to start and grow businesses.

As credit crunch turns to spending crunch, we all need to be involved in making the most of our town centres, ensuring that every place is a place of activity. That means letting the local community create the vision, as in Brentford High Street or Chippenham; ensuring artists and makers can find space to showcase their work, as pioneered by the Empty Shops Network and Meanwhile Space; and valuing and prioritising local ownership and produce.

It also means, as Mary Portas has suggested, supporting distinctive local markets where people can test new products and ideas at a low cost. It means creating town teams who can bring different parties to the table and get them involved in the future of their centre; and it’s why we need a renewed focus on ‘town centres first’ planning policies that support local character and activity.

There is much that central government can do to make the most of Mary Portas’s recommendations. But the real challenge is for towns and cities to take the lead, working with local residents to develop a vision everybody can share in.

If local councils want town centres to thrive, they need to find out how people feel about them and do something about it - whether it’s developing a local smartcard that rewards people for supporting local shops and community activity, like WiganPlus, or staging a free music festival, like Sheffield’s Tramlines, or helping community organisations to take over key spaces, like Hebden Bridge Town Hall.

As the new economics foundation argues, this is about putting money back into the local economy. But it’s more than that: it’s also about creating a sense of local pride and a return to local ownership, where assets are held by local people and organisations and used for local benefit.

Austerity shouldn’t mean years of misery. Town centres should become places where we have a good time and play a part in community life without having to come away laden with shopping bags - and what better time to start than when people are hard up?

• You can read more about our submission to the high street review here, or download the full document. There’s also a short presentation on Slideshare. To join a network of people who want to develop new ideas for town centres, visit reviveourcentres.ning.com and look out for updates in the new year.

For social sustainability, let's have social ownership

2011-12-07T16:19:00.001Z

‘The architecture was award winning - but the lifestyle? There’s more going on at local cemeteries.’

The comment, in the German magazine Der Spiegel, described the City Nord development in Hamburg last year. But it could have been equally true of many new urban developments worldwide. In the UK, the only qualification to that comment might be to delete the phrase ‘award-winning’.

Half a century after Jane Jacobs wrote the seminal guide to city development, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it’s high time to stop talking about bricks and focus on people. Perhaps someone could tell that to the UK government, whose view of housing’s role in stimulating the economy seems to have come straight from the cement-mixer.

A new report from the Young Foundation is bravely trying to correct the balance. Design for Social Sustainability argues passionately, and on good evidence, that housing developments will fail unless they promote the conditions needed for full and energetic community life. Social sustainability needs to be considered as much as environmental or economic sustainability when planning new developments, it says.

HafenCity, Hamburg: design for social sustainability?

It defines this as ‘a process for creating sustainable, successful places that promote wellbeing, by understanding what people need from the places they live and work. Social sustainability combines design of the physical realm with design of the social world – infrastructure to support social and cultural life, social amenities, systems for citizen engagement and space for people and places to evolve.’

In doing so it builds on a decade of constructive thinking about what makes places work for people, from the Urban Task Force report of 1999 to the Egan Review of skills for sustainable communities in 2004, the good work of CABE and the under-appreciated regional centres of excellence.

But the tide has shifted. Where civil servants and ministers once sang the praises of quality design and community-led planning, the emphasis now is on getting bricks on top of each other in a way that preserves the margins of commercial housebuilders. One little-noticed paragraph in the government’s recent housing strategy set out how developers could renege on previously-agreed planning obligations if they thought they could no longer afford them.

The Young Foundation argues strongly that in a rapidly urbanising world, some of the mistakes of the past can be avoided by enabling people to create their own futures and providing ‘space to grow’ - frameworks rather than blueprints. This ought to chime with the government’s belief in localism, although it is likely to run up against the growth-at-any-price agenda that dominates Treasury thinking.

One thing missing from the argument for social sustainability, though, is a clarity about how it can align with local economic and environmental sustainability.

The vast majority of the homes built since the 1980s have been boxes for private sale, dominated by poor quality design-and-build estates developed by companies looking for high margins inflated by rising land values or a shortage of supply. The firms that have given us these homes and are energetically lobbying for the relaxation of planning rules are not suddenly going to become converts to social sustainability.

To achieve the people-focused communities envisioned by the Young Foundation and others, the process of building and development needs to be placed as far as possible in the hands of people with a continuing stake in those communities - through local builders, housing co-ops, community land trusts and neighbourhood development companies.

We will never create human, sociable cities through the efforts of people whose overriding priority is to return their sector of the economy to the old days of huge contracts and property bubbles.

But local ownership is just a start. New communities need to foster economic activity among their residents, not just link people to a wider economy that is floundering. They need to be designed in ways that allow flexible uses, homeworking, the creation of local business hubs and the exchange of locally produced goods and services.

And for economic sustainability, environmental sustainability must be central. The places we build now will need to last for centuries, not decades. They need to be as flexible and self-sufficient as possible, generating enough energy to meet their own needs and providing space to grow food..

Such adaptable, resilient places will work be more likely to work socially. But that demands vision and a determination to look to the long term - qualities in short supply as builders and planners focus on short-term survival.

In praise of dry stone walls

2011-12-03T22:24:00.001Z

Across the north of England, the fields are bordered and divided by dry stone walls. In the south, before a lot of them were rooted up, hedgerows served the same purpose. They kept animals in and intruders out, and marked edges and boundaries.

Dry stone walls and hedgerows take time. Building a dry stone wall is a painstaking exercise, involving weeks of manual labour, carefully selecting stones of different shapes and sizes that will eventually lie flat and straight.

A hedgerow takes even longer. It grows into its environment, pruned and bent and cut until it does the job intended (as well as numerous others, in terms of providing habitats for wildlife as well as sloes to put in your gin).

What both dry stone walls and hedgerows have in common, as well as the time they take to create, is that they demand care and attention, they use local materials, and they last. A good hedgerow or stone wall may stand for centuries unless it’s deliberately destroyed.

I like to think of them as metaphors for building neighbourhoods. Our housing policies - and the building of social housing estates in particular, which you would imagine would demand greater care because they are for people in greater need - have too often focused on getting homes built and too seldom on what happens afterwards.

I used the image of a dry stone wall in this presentation at the recent Northern Housing Summit. I was asked to talk about regeneration after the money runs out. But the principles should apply whether there’s money or not.

There were two key points. One is that you get better results by giving people the chance to create their own future alongside the professionals and policy people - the idea of coproduction. The other is that small interventions can make a big difference - what Jaime Lerner calls ‘urban acupuncture’.

Changing the way people feel about their environment isn’t frivolous, even if it appears to take frivolous forms. Take the Pothole Gardener, who was fed up with potholes and started creating miniature gardens in them. The Pothole Gardener doesn’t have a theory of placemaking, but understands how to make people feel differently about the everyday.

I asked the people at the Northern Housing Summit - clear-headed, rational professionals - how they’d respond to a pothole garden. None of them said they’d drive over it. Most would stop and have a look. Most felt it would put a smile on their face.

It comes down to taking care, even of the things that don’t look as if they deserve care. It might not change the world, but it might just reduce the number of changes we need to make.

Reasons to be cheerful about Europe

2011-12-01T20:52:00.001Z

Austerity has become the operating system of the Western world. As we move from credit crunch to spending crunch, every day brings us a new move to reduce government debt and keep corporations afloat, and every day it becomes clearer that ordinary citizens are paying the price.

One answer is that the levers of power are still being handled on the grand scale, as we saw with Wednesday’s announcement of concerted action by the central banks of five nations and the European Central Bank to prop up the world’s financial system.

Beyond the technocracy, a chance to build networks?
Photo by TPCOM

This is the grand bargain of trickle-down economics: that by giving ‘the markets’ (as personified by fund managers and ratings agencies) what they want now, we’ll all have a future that’s happier, healthier and wealthier. The problem with the trickle-down bargain is that by the time it delivers, most of us will be dead.

If you are young and unemployed that bargain of jam tomorrow doesn’t look so attractive, unless you’re one of the lucky few on the jam-today side of the wire.

Across Europe more than a fifth of young people are out of work and it’s not getting any better. Pension rights, welfare benefits and employment rights are all being chipped away on the grounds that they’re unaffordable. This is another way of saying that bailouts are a one way street: those with resources don’t think they should be asked to share them with those without.

The problem is that it all seems too big and impersonal to change, and because we’re mostly hooked into the bargain through mortgages or pensions or employment contracts, we don’t feel we can rock the boat. Best just to trust the masters of the universe to get it right for once.

It doesn’t have to be like this. There’s a growing readiness to think about different ways of organising society that share the benefits more equally and allow citizens to take more control over their lives. Most of these ideas are small and local, from community ownership of assets to participatory budgeting and alternative currencies. But do enough of them in enough places and you have the beginnings of real change.

This ‘massive small’ approach can revitalise civil society, enliven our towns and cities, create new forms of collaboration and deliver local economic benefits. But there’s still a disconnect between this energised, networked and distributed social action and the behaviour of international political and financial institutions.

This week I was at the European Parliament to see how some are starting to bridge that gap. The European Congress for Alternatives was an opportunity for voluntary organisations and campaigning groups to see how local action could be networked at an international level.

Anna Coote from the new economics foundation talked about coproduction - a partnership between service providers, users, their families and neighbours - as a way of transforming public services. Rafaella Bolini from the Italian network ARCI spoke of how her organisation had networked 5,000 grassroots groups with more than one million members. Klaus Sambor spoke of the campaign for a minimum basic income, arguing that it could change welfare ‘from a compensatory to an emancipatory system’, providing citizens with a choice about how they participate in society.

As Niccolo Milanese, one of the organisers, put it: ‘The role of civil society is to make proposals for alternatives, and we have to fight for the space to make these proposals clearly.’

The coming year presents both a threat and an opportunity at a European level. The threat is immediate: that in the wake of the financial crisis, member states will renegotiate the Lisbon treaty in ways that weaken its already weak social clauses and lock ordinary citizens into decades of falling living standards.

The opportunity is trickier, but real: the European Citizens’ Initiative, which comes into effect in April, enables citizens to band together to call for changes at a European level. Any proposal that can garner one million supporters from at least a quarter of EU member states must be considered.

That sounds difficult, but in a networked world it shouldn’t be. The secret will be to keep proposals simple, well argued, non-partisan and in tune with the rising tide of popular concern for justice and equality. Organisations that are already well networked will play an important part here, and it’s essential that they do so openly and collaboratively.

Of course any proposal for change may be frustrated by obfuscation and filibustering within the belly of the European monster. There will inevitably be opposition. But the opportunity is not just to change European legislation, but to create networks of European citizens who can become a catalyst for democracy, locally and internationally, in an increasingly undemocratic and unequal world.

Why George Osborne’s £30bn won’t really change anything

2011-11-28T22:08:00.001Z

This was the U-turn that wasn’t: the time the Chancellor of the Exchequer became a quasi-Keynesian, pumping money into roads, rail and broadband to get Britain’s economy moving in a Brownesque stimulus package.

But it was also the time when nothing really changed - when George Osborne, having ditched much of the previous government’s help for young unemployed people, housebuilding and support for infrastructure, reinvented these policies at bargain-basement rates with the Youth Contract, national housing strategy and National Infrastructure Plan.

It was a time of missed opportunities. The chance to invest at scale in technologies and people-centred services that could set our economy up for the future was foregone in favour of more contracts for big construction firms, more support for carbon-intensive industries, more deals for giant Work Programme providers and more handshakes with the captains of industry.

We're on the road to nowhere... let's take that ride

The prize, we’re told, is economic growth. And growth will certainly keep some firms afloat that might otherwise have sunk. It will support the share prices of established companies, keeping investors happy.

But it won’t make a jot of difference to most of us. Not only because it is set within a context of shrinking spending on infrastructure (from £40bn last year to £24bn in 2013/14) but because the spending that makes most economic difference at the margins - funding for public services and welfare - is still being cut. The first £5bn for capital programmes is coming, at least in part, from cuts to revenue spending, yet it is the latter that directly employs people, putting money into the pockets of low-paid workers and thence back into local economies.

Capital spending can be good and necessary, (and it’s useful to get pension funds investing in infrastructure, even if it will take years for them to stump up the £25bn expected) but it’s a slow-acting potion. It takes time for a construction contract to turn into a job for a carpenter or electrician. Some of the money trickles down, but very little of it trickles down to those that are most hard-pressed. And the jobs created are only as long as the contract lasts.

Roads and schools have their merits, but they don’t add significantly to the productive capacity of the economy. You don’t end up with new technologies or new product lines.

Support for small businesses can also be good and necessary. But the problem, as Robert Skidelsky and Felix Martin point out in this piece for the FT, is that small businesses aren’t queuing up to take extra risks:

‘...borrowing is shrinking for two reasons: over-indebted households and companies do not want to borrow at any interest rate. Among those that are not over-indebted, confidence is shattered – uncertainty is so high that few want to put capital at risk.’

Meanwhile at the bottom of the heap, the Future Jobs Fund, which provided some real opportunities for people to learn practical skills working with voluntary organisations at the sharp end of society, is being replaced by a ‘youth contract’ managed by the same bloated Work Programme contractors that have ridden the DWP gravy train with such panache in the past. You wouldn’t have to be much of a cynic to suggest that their interests are best served by maintaining a steady supply of unemployed youngsters, just as the interests of the companies where they place unemployed people are served by a steady stream of cheap or free labour.

Even if George Osborne’s billions keep GDP positive, ordinary people are unlikely to feel the benefits. As living standards are squeezed, wages fall and Vince Cable cuts employment rights, we appear to be on a path towards a Grapes of Wrath economy where the price of a happy business elite is increasing hardship on the streets. As the Resolution Foundation recently found, even in the good times the living standards of the bottom half hardly improved: trickle-down didn’t work then, and won’t when times are tough.

So what should the Chancellor have done? Not another Brown-style stimulus of car scrappage schemes. Instead, he should have recognised that the economy that eventually emerges from years of stagnation will need to be very different. it must be fit for a changed world in which emerging countries are less willing to act as a cheap labour force servicing our lifestyles, and where resource pressures and climate change will be felt by all of us in ways we can’t fully predict.

Investing at risk in new technologies and business opportunities geared to creating a sustainable economy would have been a start, instead of resorting to the hackneyed bulldozers and concrete approach. Boosting the Green Investment Bank and university-based research and development would be a bonus. A national grid of top-up points for electric vehicles is something government could usefully provide to help prepare us for the future; community-owned high speed broadband and free wifi in all our cities and towns could create a business infrastructure that reduces the need for wasteful travel.

Subsidising installation of solar power would compensate for the removal of the current feed-n tariff and would make it affordable to those who don’t have thousands of pounds to spare, as well as reducing the demand for centralised energy production.

Most importantly, investment should be used to build practical skills among those who are already outside the labour market and who will not find their way back in with a few training courses, qualifications and benefit sanctions. These people need support to become more self-reliant, building skills that enable them to trade within their communities, and developing the confidence to make their own future. Removing the costs of policy failures will be far more effective in the long term than padding out the balance sheets of the big building firms.

We must ask the questions George Osborne (and most of his opponents) don’t: what kind of activity do we need in order to create a flourishing society, not just now but in 20 or 30 years’ time?

Or do we really think we will be happier, more able to reach our potential and better equipped to create a future for ourselves and our children with a few quarters of positive GDP and a few more miles of motorway?

Social housing needs to be a training ground, not a dumping ground

2011-11-22T10:26:00.001Z

The Riddings is a long sloping crescent of nondescript semi-detached houses, branching off into cul-de-sacs and loops. The layout is typical of a sleepy English suburb. But this particular suburb in Huddersfield achieved notoriety in 1990 as the setting for a BBC documentary, The Estate.

Local people still rankle at how they were portrayed, the producers playing to the stereotypes of dysfunctional families with uncontrollable children in squalid surroundings. Locals say most families were nothing like that, but the behaviour of a few became the yardstick by which all were judged. And they claim, with some justification, that the council used the area as a ‘dumping ground’ for people it considered too much trouble.

For decades media perceptions of council housing have been ruled by the belief that estates were dumping grounds - places where those who had nowhere else to go and weren’t really wanted anywhere else ended up. They are casually referred to as ‘sink estates’. But talk to people who live in them and you’ll find a host of stories. They are frequently stories of ordinary people trying to get by in difficult circumstances, sometimes failing, but often managing against extraordinary odds.

As you turn into Riddings Road from Woodhouse Hill you pass the Chestnut Centre, a low, modern, multi-purpose building with a library, a nursery, and a home for local services. From the centre a social enterprise, Fresh Horizons, runs a youth club, a housing repair service, training schemes and more. One of its latest projects is a scheme to bring empty private properties back into use.

Read all about it: the Chestnut Centre offers services run by local people

The startling thing about Fresh Horizons, when you compare it with many services in similar estates, is that the vast majority of the staff are local people - people who in other places might never dream of working in positions of responsibility serving their neighbourhood. The difference is that Fresh Horizons has faith in the abilities of local residents to do the jobs that need doing in their area. Unlike so many officials and policymakers, it hasn’t written them off.

This week the government launched its strategy for housing. It was a mixed bag, and most of the commentary was on whether or not the numbers would stack up to meet projected demand, or whether underwriting 95% loans for prospective homeowners was a good idea.

The numbers are important, particularly in the light of the £4bn taken out of housing finance as part of the government’s deficit-cutting programme. The housing strategy is a belated, limited admission of the failure of the private market to plug the gap left by the withdrawal of government investment. But the numbers are only part of the story.

There were a few nuggets in the housing strategy that point to the real story, which is that housing is first of all about people, not bricks and mortar. Providing affordable housing (whether rented or as a step towards ownership) is about giving people a foundation from which they can build their lives. A home isn’t just somewhere to be comfortable: without it, learning, employment, health and involvement in society are all hobbled.

One such nugget was the encouragement of what the government now calls ‘custom homes’ - that’s self-build to you and me - and particularly the willingness to turn over surplus public land to self-builders. Another was the promise of extra money to tackle the blight of empty homes.

The strategy highlighted the example of Almere in the Netherlands, a new community that includes a 100-hectare self-build zone, in which residents have to comply with broad design principles but have the freedom to build homes to suit their own needs.

The point about self-build is that it entrusts people to take responsibility for their own lives. People aren’t dumped on - they’re given a space to learn and develop skills while providing for their own needs in the way they consider best.

Unfortunately much of the government’s strategy is predicated on the idea that social housing is a safety net grudgingly provided to those who can prove they are most in need. There is little that echoes the attitude of the self-build proposals, which is that people can develop the skills and capacity to improve their lives and just need the space and the help to put those skills into practice.

If we’re to make the most of social housing in future, it needs to be a training ground, not a dumping ground. We simply can’t afford to shift millions of people into the category of ‘economically inactive’ and write off entire communities because the work that brought them into being is no longer there.

There is no reason why people who live in social housing estates should not be trained and employed to provide the services needed in their neighbourhoods, from housing repairs to street cleaning, from social care to generating their own renewable energy. It may be cheaper on paper to employ a contractor to deliver a standardised service, but if one of the functions of social housing is to help people in crisis get back on their feet, helping to run local services is far more worthwhile and effective than courses in CV writing and interview skills.

There could be even more. People who live in social housing estates could so what I call placemaking with dirty hands, turning over unused space to local food production; they could run their own apprenticeship schemes, training their kids as builders or electricians, gardeners or carers. They should be the people who build the homes of the future, maintain the ones we now have and care for the people who live in them. Our estates could become engines of enterprise instead of drains on public resources.

Such an attitude needs to run right through our public services and social policies, providing opportunities for people to learn and to flourish where they are, not in some knowledge economy nirvana where the government or corporations or political theorists would like them to be. When all are able to contribute to the wellbeing of the places they live in and share the benefits, we may just start to inch our way towards real equality.

The last Post for localism?

2011-11-17T21:03:00.001Z

My first proper job was on a local newspaper. In the beginning I worked at the paper’s main office, on an industrial estate sandwiched between a sewage works and a scent factory. I could never work out whether the location had been chosen as a deliberate reflection of the paper’s values.

After three months I moved to the next town up the road, where the office was much more traditional: a high street shopfront with a cubby-hole behind it, in which you could occasionally see the staff’s lower limbs under the pall of cigarette smoke.

All the town’s cranks, gossips, aspiring politicians and wannabe saviours of the world would pop in, usually with a spooky knowledge of which reporter was the newest and therefore most likely to listen to their ramblings. But there were also people with wrongs to right and stories to tell, and with inspiring ideas - from the church minister who turned an old bus depot into a youth club, to the young dad who stormed in with a jar full of cockroaches he’d collected in his temporary council accommodation.

It was a place where you knew what was going on and were held accountable if you got it wrong. You very quickly learned that what you wrote affected people’s lives.

In recent years local papers have been dying on their feet. Reporters have increasingly done their work from centralised offices; Google has replaced the dogeared contacts book. Some of the work is being done more efficiently; it is certainly being done more cheaply.

But as ownership has become more distant from the communities they serve, many local papers (including their associated websites) have become shadows of their former selves.

This brilliant piece by Mike Lockley, celebrating his 25 years as editor of the Cannock Chase Post in the west midlands, shows how vital the local paper can be. He writes:

‘... I, like every other weekly journalist, can play a part in the community I work in. I’ve helped save schools, stopped telecommunication towers being erected and even put pink custard back on a school menu.

‘Times and technology change, people’s desire to know what’s happening in their community doesn’t. A town without its own weekly newspaper is a town without a heart.’

The following week the paper’s owners, Trinity Mirror, announced that the Post, along with other titles, would close. Content would be handled by a ‘regional production hub’ instead.

From the viewpoint of Trinity Mirror’s shareholders, and certainly its executives, this doubtless makes sense. It’s journalism without the scary bits - the bits that involve meeting people and being accountable to your readers. Trinity Mirror has bigger fish to fry than a few readers in the west midlands - it was £262m in debt at the end of July and is looking for savings of £25m next year.

But for people living in Cannock Chase, it’s the removal of a layer of accountability and another nail in the coffin of local identity.

When the House of Lords select committee on communications investigated media ownership three years ago, it found that 82.7% of local and regional titles were owned by nine organisations. The catalogue of concentration continues, to the detriment of localities that are losing their media (see this piece by Roy Greenslade and this recent post by Jon Slattery).

Their Lordships were worried:

‘Locally, nationally and internationally, the news media are becoming concentrated in fewer hands, and that brings with it risks in a democracy. Consolidation can reduce the number of voices available to the public; it can mean that disproportionate power to influence government and the political process is placed in a few hands.’

It doesn’t have to be like this. I’ve been arguing for a different approach to town centres, where the high street once again becomes the hub of the community (see this slideshow) and where business is geared to local interests and concerns and reinvests in the local economy. Local newspapers could and should be part of this.

It’s not all bad news. The growth of independent hyperlocal websites is a promising development, and as commercial organisations decide there just isn’t enough money to be extracted from local papers any more, they are going to become increasingly significant. But they need proper investment - they’re too dependent on the enthusiasm of a handful of people and don’t have the capacity to do the legwork of monitoring courts and councils.

A better model is the West Highland Free Press, a newspaper owned by its employees and that does what good local papers do best - campaigns for the area it serves. As more newspapers serve the interests of distant shareholders, it’s time to replicate this model and turn local papers and websites into community assets that help put the heart back in our towns.

The government has just passed legislation to put unwanted public assets into local hands. Wouldn't it be great to have a 'community right to buy' for local media?

Community: it's no picnic

2011-11-15T08:30:00.000Z

The best picnics weren’t the ones from my childhood. Some have been the ones with my children: fish and chips on the beach at Whitby, or trying to get a barbecue going by a midge-infested lake in Wales or Scottish shore.

There were bigger ones, too, on a scrap of ground behind an old Victorian brick church in east London, with rice and peas, Sri Lankan curry, chili con carne and no end of fizzy pop. In a place where a quarter of the population would change every year and where nobody knew exactly what cultural attitudes and beliefs another person would bring with them, food was a kind of lingua franca, an assertion of shared humanity even if shared identity was more difficult to grasp.

Kevin Harris, who writes the excellent Neightbourhoods blog and who also spent many years in Newham, was launching an intriguing booklet about picnics yesterday. Based on a real picnic in London, it was also an examination of the concept of picnic and what it tells us about community.

Kevin’s forte is looking difficult questions in the face and refusing to accept bland answers. So the community that emerges from his wonderfully illustrated book is not the cheery stereotype of Royal Wedding street parties or Big Lunches, but something more prickly - the kind of picnic where sand gets in your sandwiches and thistles insist on spiking up through your carefully placed rug.

I couldn’t get to the launch, but I thought I’d test Kevin’s approach with an unscientific tour around the archives of the photo-sharing site Flickr. I found plenty to back his thesis.

Take this one. It’s captioned ‘Fourth of July picnic by Negroes, St Helena Island’, from the US Library of Congress. It’s dated 1944. The reminder of the racism and division of the still quite recent past needs no embellishment.

Let’s go back a bit further. This is Norway in 1910. It’s captioned ‘Picnic at a mountain farm in Askvoll, Sogn og Fjordane.’ It reminds me of some of the Lake District walks I’ve done where half the party wished they were somewhere else (usually back down the mountain, either still in bed or at the pub).

Here’s one from 1916, from the Nantucket Historical Association. It’s five women at the Congregational Church Sunday School Picnic. Don’t they look as if they’re having a great time?

Here’s an interesting one from 1940. It’s the First Annual Jewish Butchers Picnic, Minneapolis, from the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest. The caption writer notes: ‘The woman in the back row was not likely to have been a butcher, as it was not considered to be women's work in any culture.’ Just in case you were wondering.

Move forward a few years and suddenly the picnic is motorised. At the top of this post is a perfect Dutch family from the 1960s, complete with their Daf. They don’t make cars like that any more, and for good reasons.

For my favourite, we have to go back to America. This couple really know how to do picnic: sitting by the open boot of their car making the most of the view of - well, the boot of their car.

As Kevin puts it, ‘picnic accentuates the ephamerality of place-and-company. We share food and conversation together for a time, and then we move off.’

It’s community, but at arm’s length: ‘We don’t want community all the time, just as we prefer to eat indoors, at tables, most of the time. Picnic does not deny disorder, it accommodates it.’

Just as with holidays, the stories we remember and retell about community or picnic are often the stories of mishap and misadventure - the embarrassing moment, the faux pas, rather than the cheerful conversation or splendid food. And perhaps, as Kevin hints, community is frequently a nerve-wracking venture into unknown and risky territory. Or is he delving too deep into an innocent pleasure that should be left alone?

Embarrassing bodies: the silent witnesses to system failure

2011-11-14T08:30:00.000Z

OK computer - you're in charge...

Last week Jack Shemtob, 53, a senior manager at Transport for London, was told he was being made redundant after 30 years’ work. Shortly afterwards he took the lift to the sixth floor and plunged to his death in the office atrium.

Earlier in the week Mark and Helen Mullins, both aged 48, died at their home in Bedworth, Warwickshire. It was thought Mr Mullins, a former Army PE instructor, and his wife had killed themselves in desperation after what the Metro newspaper described as ‘a series of health and benefit setbacks’, including having their 12-year-old daughter taken into care.

A Salvation Army worker was quoted as saying: ‘This couple were simply allowed to slip through the net with tragic consequences.’ When they needed help, it wasn’t there.

Whatever was going through Mr Shemtob’s mind, it was clear he too had reached the end of his resources. An organisation that is making a fifth of its 25,000 staff redundant had not foreseen the consequences for one individual.

Maybe you can’t blame Transport for London, in the same way that maybe you can’t blame the social services and health workers assigned to Mark and Helen Mullins. Mostly people soldier on and get by. Those struggling on benefits remain out of sight and out of mind, and those struggling to cope with redundancy disappear quietly, as they are no doubt meant to.

It’s embarrassing when people do something extreme, like committing suicide. It disturbs the order. It tells us all that the systems don’t work. It’s an affront to management, an intrusion of an alternative reality where people placed under intolerable stresses really do crack up.

Most of what we read about management and running organisations - especially public services - preserves the veneer of respectability and recasts organisational changes that mess up people’s lives as efficiencies and innovations. So it’s been refreshing in the last few days to read David Boyle’s new book, The Human Element.

Boyle is one of the more underrated writers of our age, and his latest book is both grounded and far-sighted. He counters the organisational cultures that cannot handle human beings with a call for the introduction of a ‘people principle’ throughout businesses and public services: a belief that people work better when trusted to do the job well, and that organisations based on relationships and human understandings are more likely to act efficiently and effectively.

David Boyle has long been an advocate of co-production, where ordinary people are involved in shaping public services or businesses, and The Human Element renews that call. It proposes ten people-centred rules for getting things done, first of which is to hire people for their personality rather than their qualifications.

He rails against the empires of global corporations and monolithic public institutions, demanding a really localist approach that gives everyone the chance to feel useful. He calls it ‘the radical devolution of work to people, aware that their innate skills are their main tool to make things happen’.

Echoing Edgar Cahn’s belief that there should be ‘no more throwaway people’, he rejects the cultures of efficiency sold by the bucketload by consultants like McKinsey, instead arguing that human interaction and intuition should be at the heart of our organisations. He also challenges the version of localism dispensed by the current government, arguing: ‘There is no point in localism if towns and cities stay powerless supplicants to the power of semi-monopolies such as supermarkets or giant waste contractors.’

Sometimes Boyle skates over the complexities and difficulties of human relationships and their scope for going disastrously wrong. But in a world that increasingly seems to think all risks can be overcome with the right set of algorithms, that considers the answer to Europe’s financial problems is handing over power to unelected technocrats, and that looks on helplessly when people are driven to despair, his vision of people-centred institutions is not just timely but vital.

Lest we forget: there’s more to it than poppies

2011-11-11T13:08:00.001Z

Picture from boxlace on Flickr

Deep in rural Lincolnshire, there’s a group of villages on the fringe of former military bases. Many of the people who live there used to work for the armed forces, and feel a sense of home. Others have moved in, either because they fancied the ideal of the country life or because they were trying to get away from difficult circumstances.

When the bases were open, there were community halls and sports grounds. The housing, though basic, was looked after. Since the Ministry of Defence left, homes were sold to a succession of absentee landlords; facilities were closed down; sports grounds were fenced off.

The Rowner estate in Gosport had a similar story. Just over a year ago I wrote a report on the MOD’s approach to dealing with its surplus land, and some of the ways of getting better outcomes for local communities.

The good news is that the government has woken up to its responsibilities. A task force was set up last year on the ‘military covenant’, the state’s unwritten obligations to those who serve in the forces. It recommended a ‘community covenant’ where local people pledge their support to local service and ex-service personnel, and a grant scheme has been set up to strengthen the ties between local communities and the armed forces.

But we could do much more. It’s de rigeur for politicians to describe all soldiers as heroes, but they’re ordinary people too, with ordinary needs like homes, jobs, and opportunities to thrive with their families and friends.

They are also ordinary people who have sometimes faced extraordinary stresses, and whose lives may be damaged, physically or emotionally, as a result. Some become homeless or have drink or drug problems. Around 3,000 of them have ended up in prison, often for violent offences.

So the real job of the military covenant is provide a path back from the regimented world of the military into the more chaotic world of ordinary life. For many that life will be one without great job prospects, without easy access to home ownership and without close local connections with family, friends and community.

The government has offered to give ex-service people priority for council housing. But it could do much more. It could ensure that some of the many surplus military assets coming up for sale are used to create opportunities for people leaving the forces to build and manage their own homes and facilities alongside local communities.

It could create ex-forces community land trusts, providing hubs where ex-service people can develop business ideas as well as having affordable homes. It could ensure land is used to bring benefits to areas that have become economically dependent on the military activity they have hosted for many years.

There are signs that the MOD, which for many years has only looked at its assets in terms of the money that can be made from them, is beginning to take a broader view. A new strategy for land disposal mentions that ‘the re-use of former MOD sites can often provide new and exciting opportunities for economic development and regeneration’. It will be good to see those opportunities realised.

It’s important to remember, and the poppy is a very visible way of recalling and reflecting. But beyond the annual symbolism of remembering the armed forces as heroes, we need to remember most of them as ordinary people who, when their stint in the services is over, need our support to live ordinary lives.

In which I praise MPs for saying something sensible...

2011-11-03T00:30:00.000Z

Pour a double espresso. I’m about to praise a group of MPs for saying something sensible.

Earlier this year I commented on what the government, apparently without irony, called its plan for community-led regeneration. This toolkit, to use local government minister Grant Shapps’s term, entitled Regeneration to Enable Growth, could be described as concise if it had any coherence; without it, it’s simply flimsy.

At the time I said it was ‘neither a guide to regeneration nor a strategy for the future. Without analysis, without methodology, without goals and without evaluation, it’s not so much a vision as an abdication of responsibility.’

Eight months on, the House of Commons communities and local government committee has taken a similar view:

‘...the document gives us little confidence that the Government has a clear strategy for addressing the country’s regeneration needs. It lacks strategic direction and is unclear about the nature of the problem it is trying to solve. It focuses overwhelmingly upon the achievement of economic growth, giving little emphasis to the specific issues faced by deprived communities and areas of market failure.’

Back to blight: have we learned anything from the past?

As someone who submitted evidence to the committee’s inquiry, it’s welcome that they see both the need for a real strategy to tackle deprivation and the inadequacy of the government’s response (in England, anyway: the Scots and Welsh are more enlightened).

The language of the committee is restrained, but unmistakeable in its conclusions. In short, it concludes that the government has failed to learn (or even consider) the lessons from previous attempts at regeneration, positive or negative. It lacks any intelligible plan to bring investment into deprived areas. Its aspirations for ‘community-led’ regeneration are at odds with its withdrawal of funding from organisations working in our poorest communities.

As the MPs say:

‘Having concluded that previous approaches to regeneration were “unsustainable” and “unaffordable”, it appears to have dismissed them all and chosen to start again with a blank canvas.’

Grant Shapps was adamant that this didn’t just mean abandoning people to their fate. Confronted with evidence that the arbitrary withdrawal of funding from housing market renewal schemes had left people stranded in half-demolished and boarded-up neighbourhoods, he said his explanation to local residents would be:

‘To say that this is an inevitable consequence of an unsustainable approach, which I appreciate is not much help to somebody who is stuck in the middle of all of this, and that we will not just turn our backs and walk away.’

Yet walking away is exactly what the government has done: follow the money and you’ll find it’s flowing out, not in. Mr Shapps’s response to a problem at least partly of his own making is instructive. On the day the housing market renewal areas gave evidence to the committee, the government suddenly announced a fund of £30m to help the worst-hit areas exit from a programme that had already been stopped in its tracks.

He also claimed the much-vaunted regional growth fund would be used to tackle the issues the housing market renewal programme had been set up to address. This was news to Lord Heseltine, responsible for overseeing the allocation of the fund:

‘The fact is the Regional Growth Fund is not about regeneration. We have never been told to go and regenerate any community or anything like that. What we have been told is very clear and simple: there are some cuts. The cuts are going to affect different parts of the country in different ways. They are going to affect those areas where public expenditure is relatively high more than where it is not, and therefore the Regional Growth Fund is designed to create private sector jobs in areas adversely affected by the cuts. That is it.’

If this was a football match, the select committee report is the equivalent of the crowd chanting at the manager: ‘You’re going to be sacked in the morning.’

But because they use more gentlemanly language, you have to stop and ask yourselves why it should take months of scrutiny by our members of parliament to remind the government that it needs a strategy to tackle a problem. You have to ask why ministers should need to be told to explain what they think the problem is and what action should be taken. And you have to wonder what level of intelligence and application by ministers should prompt a suggestion that they should go away and look at what has been done before and what lessons have been learned.

If Shakespeare had been writing the story of regeneration policy in England, he might well use the words of Jacques in As You Like It to describe the stage we’ve now reached:

Last scene of all, 
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion, 
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

• For more analysis and commentary on the report, including what it missed, see this post.

Where will we stand when the wave strikes?

2011-11-01T12:58:00.000Z

Picture from Cornell University Library on Flickr

There are two things you can do to prepare for a tsunami. The first is to make sure you’re in the right place - ideally, well above the worst the wave can do. The second needs to happen many years before the wave strikes, which is to build infrastructure that can survive it.

A wave is about to break, and we have taken neither the first nor the second precaution.

Joseph Schumpeter theorised that the various cycles recognised by economists sometimes converged, with devastating results. The idea of the ‘long wave’, formulated by the economist Nikolai Krondatiev, suggests that episodes of huge economic turbulence occur every 40-60 years. Schumpeter believed this process of ‘creative destruction’ would herald a new social order.

Schumpeter was more or less right about the timing, though less accurate about the consequences. He was rediscovered shortly after the collapse of Lehmann Brothers in 2008, his analysis chiming with the mood of the time. Perhaps this was the beginning of a new world economy that could free itself from its dependence on financial speculation, create new forms of economic activity and share the proceeds more fairly.

Or perhaps not. Since those heady days, the modus operandi of governments across the piece has been to place their faith in placating the financial speculators whose actions led to the collapse of the froth economy.

Our economic totem is not the wellbeing of our people, the opportunities they have to work and flourish, or the productivity of our industry, but convincing the international rating agencies to preserve our triple-A credit status. Interestingly, preserving this rating doesn’t make a jot of difference in terms of getting credit to the small businesses that most need it.

According to David Cameron and George Osborne, austerity is the price we need to pay for this totem. While the Eurozone flounders, we’ll be the safe haven that attracts investment and economic growth.

For those who measure everything by GDP figures, this week’s news of a 0.5% rise in GDP in the third quarter of 2011 is hardly a rousing affirmation of current policies: at best, it says things are not getting worse. But even that may be looking on the bright side.

According to a major international report this week, a new ‘jobs recession’ is on its way. National media, inevitably, picked up on the International Labour Organization’s predictions of social unrest, which it said was now a rising risk in 45 out of 118 countries.

The reason why unrest is more likely is that we can expect a new wave of unemployment next year as continuing economic weakness takes its toll. As the ILO puts it in its new World of Work report:

‘...there is a vicious cycle of a weaker economy affecting jobs and society, in turn depressing real investment and consumption, thus the economy and so on.’

So why will this wave be worse than 2008? The ILO offers three reasons.

First, there is a lack of capacity. Firms that withstood the first wave of recession do not have the resources now that they had then. Many are not able to call on more credit, and demand for their products and services is falling.

Second, there has been a lack of care. Governments across the world, and in the UK in particular, have focused on cutting social programmes in order to tackle national deficits, but in doing so have put themselves in a position where they have far less to offer new victims of closures and redundancies. Their answer to rising unemployment is to demand that the unemployed look harder for work.

Third, there has been a lack of coordination. Where world leaders at least talked the same talk in 2008, they now squabble and bicker over bailouts with little thought to the kind of economies and societies we will end up with afterwards.

And there are few attempts to connect all this with the lives of ordinary people. As the ILO says:

‘...not enough attention has been paid to jobs as a key driver of recovery. Countries have increasingly focused on appeasing financial markets. In particular, in advanced economies, the debate has often centred on fiscal austerity and how to help banks –without necessarily reforming the bank practices that led to the crisis, or providing a vision for how the real economy will recover.’

The ILO points out that over the years of economic growth, a rising proportion of profits have been used to pay dividends to owners and shareholders (especially in the financial sector) rather than reinvesting in the business or the workforce. This rapacity is most apparent in the use of food for financial speculation:

‘The total commodity return for one of the big investors rose by 84 per cent between 2003 and 2008. In general, during the same period, the prices paid to food producers increased less. For example, producer prices for staple foods increased by between 10 and 20 per cent in Brazil, Cameroon and Mali; and by between 10 and 30 per cent in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Kenya.’

The ILO calls for measures to restore credit to small firms, to invest in productive capacity, and to curb the casino mentality with a ‘Robin Hood tax’ on food speculation.

Most importantly, though, it calls for our response to the next wave to be rooted in action to address social inequalities. Recognising that the clamour for justice and fairness arising from the ‘Great Recession’ is only just beginning, it calls for an approach that is at root an ethical as well as an economic one.

It recognises that the systematic removal of wealth from the productive economy is an act that has moral implications, because it ultimately removes people from the workforce and leaves them at the mercy of increasingly tattered state safety nets.

It also tells something about where we need to be when the next wave strikes. For most of us, it’s too late to run. The higher ground here is not where the wealthy retreat when the storm breaks, but where the concerns for a better way of living are being worked out. It is where people are working with and for each other, not just for themselves.

Nobody knows what changes the next wave will bring. I recently suggested this was a time to invest in the optimists. For me, the optimists are not the ones who cling to the old in the hope that everything will return to the status quo; neither are they the ones who can do well out of others’ misfortune.

The optimists are those who can look over the edge, see how bad things can be, and then work to find better ways. They are the ones who believe questions of justice, fairness, and personal and corporate responsibility should be the start of our economic debates and not a fluffy optional extra when everything’s going swimmingly.

Empty spaces and meeting places: dealing with division

2011-10-26T09:04:00.001+01:00

How will community be built in the 21st century? If you want to know the lie of the land, sometimes you must literally see how the land lies and what human beings have done to it.

Ancient settlements were connected by trade routes and divided by fault lines: valleys, rivers and hills were means meeting or contested territory. This week I was in Luton, where the barriers and bridges, physical and psychological, were obvious - sometimes painfully so.

Arrive by train and you soon find yourself in one of the town’s empty spaces. St George’s Square is not supposed to be empty: it is one of those bits of public realm left over from the days when local authorities had money to spend to make their town centres buzzing and vibrant. It has a patch of green, a fountain where children can play, and around the edge a Wetherspoon pub and a Costa Coffee.

Watching people use the space, most of which is paved, was informative. People crossed to go into The Mall, the indoor shopping centre that, like a black hole, sucks in the town’s life behind its blank walls. They sat on the edges to wait for a bus or passed through towards the town hall and pedestrianised shopping area. Although it was the half term holiday, there was no sign of any kids - neither young children nor teenagers hanging out. Pigeons bathed in the puddle created by the fountain.

Wend your way through the hard landscaping of George Street, take a turn to the left, and you’ll find yourself eventually at Luton’s parish church, St Mary’s. Between the church and The Mall, railings corral pedestrians and windowless walls proclaim this the backside of town. Over towards the railway, an abandoned industrial estate awaits redevelopment. The place that might once have been the social core of the town has become a traffic-ruled no-man’s-land.

On the opposite side of the town centre is Bury Park. To reach Bury Park on foot from the town centre you have to risk life and limb crossing multiple lanes of traffic, or traverse a skeletal concrete bridge high above the inner ring. When there is trouble, as there has been in recent years, it’s easy for the police to seal off Bury Park from the town centre, closing the bridge and using the natural barriers of major roads.

These unpeopled places are more than physical barriers. They keep communities from each other. Lines on the map can become lines of fear and suspicion, resentment and grievance.

In Luton these lines are particularly fraught. In the 1990s the town was associated with the Islamic extremism of Abu Hamza; two and a half years ago this erupted when a small group of al-Muhajiroun supporters gatecrashed the homecoming parade of the Royal Anglian Regiment and hurled insults at the returning solders.

That incident served as a rad rag to the already inflamed passions of the town’s far right. Luton soon became known as the heartland of the English Defence League, the port from which they have exported their particular brand of fascism to towns and cities across England.

Inevitably, assumptions begin to take over from the reality. As supporters of the EDL are predominantly white and working-class, a Muslim living in Bury Park might soon imagine every white working-class Englishman as a threat. When, as has happened, a local mosque is firebombed, such fears grow and, left alone, take root.

The assumptions encroach on the other side, too. If extremists and ideologues wear traditional Islamic dress, how do non-Muslims know anyone in Islamic garb is safe? In such a climate of suspicion, each community assumes the other guilty until proved innocent.

But just as physical places can create psychological barriers, they can also help bring them down.

Some of these will be neutral places. The bland, familiar spaces of a Costa Coffee or a shopping mall can sometimes make the different less alien, the alien less scary. What adds no distinction or creativity to the urban mix can, perversely, be a place where people can leave some of their cultural luggage at the door. These non-territories can provide a setting where there is less to lose by talking.

A better place for bridge-building is the meal table. Neutrality is the lowest common denominator approach to community, the waiting room at the start of the journey. Food at its blandest is the negation of culture; food prepared with care is an expression of identity and pride. When we taste the way others express themselves, our palate is stimulated and our curiosity is aroused. We start to want to know more about the people who express themselves in this way.

Eventually, we can start to engage with spaces that are entirely ‘other’. This week a Muslim community worker showed me the mosque that was firebombed, taking me into the side room where the window was forced and explaining the damage that was done. By getting an inkling of his story and part of the story of the people who use that space, it’s possible to appreciate the fears and suspicions they might have and their desire to find safety in their own spaces.

Looking around Luton and listening to the stories of two men whose work is to build bridges between faiths and cultures, I was reminded of the kaleidoscopic complexities of building communities. But sitting with them and chatting and observing the trust between them, I came away optimistic that we can devise meetings of body and mind that can move beyond an ubiquitous blandness into a serious engagement with people’s real selves.

A People's Budget: why not just do it?

2011-10-24T14:46:00.000+01:00

Democracy as we currently practice it is a funny system. A form of governance intended to maximise public involvement and give everyone an equal say in society has turned into a ritual where, for most of us, sticking an X on a ballot paper every few years is as much involvement as we’ll ever have.

There are of course other ways to make your voice heard. You can write letters to the paper or create petitions to protest or demand the righting of wrongs. The Avaaz network and organisations like 38 Degrees have been particularly successful at mobilising public opinion around causes such as preventing the sale of publicly-owned forests.

But examples of real involvement in the decision-making process are relatively few. That’s way it’s important that today the charity Church Action on Poverty is calling for one per cent of all local authority budgets to be handed over to communities through participatory budgeting processes.

Participatory budgeting does what it says on the tin: local people get together to decide between themselves how money is spent.

That process is important because it encourages people to take responsibility: if you’ve made the spending decision, you can’t blame someone else for the consequences. It encourages creativity: it’s an opportunity to put new ideas and approaches on the table rather than leave them to professional (and generally risk-averse) ‘experts’. And it encourages connectivity: if you’re making decisions with others about how money is spent, you learn to balance your own interests against those of others.

So participatory budgeting can be an important step in the quest for that elusive holy grail of fairness. In hard times, it helps people distinguish between spending that is wasteful and necessary investment.

It isn’t a panacea - people will make mistakes. But the important thing is that they will be their own mistakes, not someone else’s. And that’s the kind of democracy we should all be striving for.

So the question to ask about the People’s Budget campaign is not, ‘will it work?’ but ‘why not try?’. And if the answer is that ordinary people can’t be trusted, that speaks volumes about the shrivelled, debased version of democracy prevalent in many parts of the UK.

An occupation for the 99 per cent

2011-10-22T17:41:00.001+01:00

We are the 99 per cent. That slogan has captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of people as the Occupy Wall Street movement has spread worldwide.

As the instigators and beneficiaries of global financial crisis go about their business, protest camps are establishing themselves as testimony to a rising tide of calls for a different way of life, where people matter more than finance and equality more than individual wealth.

We have all seen striking pictures of ordinary people protesting, many of whom have never taken to the streets before. We have seen too that when push comes to shove (often literally) the forces of law and order are readier to protect the laws and orders of the Masters of the Universe than the people who have been most hurt by their actions.

Yet 99 per cent of people are clearly not demonstrating, protesting and occupying.It might be truer to observe that the 99 per cent are just trying to get by, going about their daily business in the hope that things will get better.

The power of the protest camps is not that 99 per cent of people are there, or even that 99 per cent of people support them (which is questionable). It is the power of witness: like the child who said the emperor had no clothes, they point out what most people are reluctant to say. There's a long history to draw on here, from the civil rights movements of the 1960s to the million-strong protest against the Iraq war.

While such occupations are a testament to the strength of feeling, they often do little more than express a desire for change - for a world in which people take more power over their own lives and have more say in the running of the world around them.

There's another kind of occupation that can help bring about this change. It involves taking over land and assets and re-using them for the benefit of local people.

Assets for the people: Hebden Bridge Town Hall

In Coin Street on London's South Bank, local people who were at risk of being displaced to make way for commercial development created their own housing co-op and now manage much of the land in one of the capital's prime areas, with affordable homes and childcare for people who would otherwise have been forced out of the city centre.

In Liverpool, the Eldonian Village is another testimony to local people's refusal to accept that the authorities knew best. Here people whose neighbourhood would have been destroyed by a slum clearance scheme made it clear they wanted to stay put, and are now running their own homes and creating work for local people.

On the Isle of Gigha in the west of Scotland, a community that had been neglected for decades by their private landlord have bought the island for themselves, repaired their homes and are generating their own renewable energy.

In Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, local people have taken over the former town hall, unwanted by the council but valued by local residents.They are creating much-needed community meeting spaces and room for start-up businesses.

There is a rapidly growing movement of community asset ownership, with local people taking over property and running it in their own interests. Their actions often start with immediate issues: the need to create a community garden, the disappearance of the last bank in the high street, the closure of the local library. Where the private market has ignored their needs and the state has failed to be an effective steward of local assets, people are starting to move in and take over.

It isn't easy, it takes time and energy and money, and there are many pitfalls along the way, as recent publications by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have shown. But when it works, it shows how land and economic activity can be managed for the benefit of the 99 per cent, not just the wealthy and well-connected. It may not get the attention of a protest in Wall Street or outside St Paul's Cathedral, but this is a movement to watch.

This article first appeared in the Huffington Post.

The space to innovate is inside your head

2011-10-18T21:04:00.001+01:00

Last week I was in an expensively refitted office in central London. It contained a funkily designed ‘innovation space’, clearly marked so you knew what you were supposed to be doing there.

On the walls were inspirational cartoons. Brightly coloured furniture, thought-provoking slogans and some whizzy technology all added to the mix.

I went away wondering what kind of culture of innovation requires an ‘innovation space’ to make it happen. It’s the same feeling I had when visiting Electric Works, the office block in Sheffield once known as a ‘digital campus’, which demonstrates how exciting and creative work can be by having a ceiling-to-floor helter-skelter.

I’ve nothing against giant slides or funky furniture. But I think the starting point is the action, not the ambience.

Tina Saaby, city architect for Copenhagen, shared some of her stories about thinking differently last week. Her talk, for Sheffield’s Urban Design Week, grasped something that’s fundamental to innovation: it’s about experimenting and testing, flexibility and learning from failure.

That experimentation can happen on a wide scale, as in the creation of spaces for parkour during the redevelopment of the giant Carlsberg factory, or by turning the shell of a waste treatment plant into a dry ski slope. But just as important is the micro-experimentation, such as roof gardens that provide new meeting places and views over the city.

Picture by Mikael Colville-Andersen on Flickr
used under Creative Commons licence

Innovation is also about changing attitudes. One of the city’s projects, Gang i Købnhavn, is known as ‘making the city happen’ - as Saaby put it, ‘we’re trying to learn never to say no’. Inevitably, sometimes things go wrong. But it turns on its head the traditional management approach that says you don’t try things that might be risky.

Innovation is also about changing simple things. Copenhagen is famous as a cycling city - more than a third of residents cycle to work or school every day. It also snows in winter, and anyone who’s tried to ride a bike in the snow will tell you it’s no fun. So the city has decided to prioritise clearing snow from cycle lanes, a simple reallocation of resources to keep the place moving.

Copenhagen is also challenging traditional assumptions that high rents mean higher value. Property owners in the city centre are being encouraged to reduce ground floor rents in order to bring activity into empty buildings, arguing that this increases the value of the whole building as tenants are then more likely to move into the higher floors. And as Tina Saaby explains, ‘it’s very important for the city that ground floors are alive’. Walk around some of our boarded-up high streets and you’ll understand that at a glance.

You don’t need to design special places to create this sort of thinking, but you do need people who are ready to design - to take risks and challenge conventions. Too much of what passes for innovation in many of our towns and cities is just seeking out different ways to flog the same dead horses.

Say hello to the new peasants

2011-10-16T00:01:00.000+01:00

Peasants get a raw deal. For most of the last century they’ve been despised and denigrated. In a gadget-driven, finance obsessed world, being considered a peasant is to be thought a loser.

In many cultures it’s a term of abuse. Check out the Urban Dictionary and you’ll see a peasant is described as ‘simple-minded, rustic, crude’ or ‘a lesser being’. Consult a proper dictionary and it’s not much better - the Oxford English Dictionary describes a peasant as ‘a poor smallholder or agricultural labourer of low social status’.

Even Soviet Russia, that supposed republic of workers and peasants, had a lot more time for the workers than for the peasants. Modernism everywhere put the peasant in his or her place, and that place was mainly in the past and on the sidelines.

With that weight of derision against them, you wouldn’t bet on peasants to make a comeback. But that may be exactly what’s starting to happen, and exactly what we need. It’s time to welcome the new peasants.

In a world where food shortages have already pushed the best part of a billion people to the brink and where convenience food and convenience shopping have made rarities of the skills that have evolved over millennia of growing and preparing, cooking and preserving, the new peasant may have the last laugh.

The old peasants scraped a living from the land. In an urbanised world, the new peasants will know how to supplement their living from the land. The old peasants were rural, visiting the towns only to sell. The new peasants will be mainly urban, reclaiming and repossessing unused and neglected plots to grow and share.

We are already seeing it. Detroit has become a byword for urban agriculture. I have written elsewhere about Incredible Edible Todmorden and the way a town has been redefined by growing. Brighton has put out planning guidance to encourage food growing as part of new developments. In England, 88,000 town and city dwellers are now waiting for allotments and the government is encouraging people to grow community orchards.

Organisations like Landshare are bringing together growers with people who have surplus or unused land. Growing has become a strong theme in the Transition Towns network.

As food and energy prices rise, the ability to supplement our lives from the earth around us will become more important. People will understand the folly of relying on imports from halfway across the world when they have the capacity to grow food on their doorstep at minimal expense. They’ll realise the stupidity of allowing skills that used to be almost universal to become the preserve of a few corporations. And with the growing, cooking and sharing comes a rediscovery of community and the building of new networks - networks of resilience that help people cope with the bumps and bruises of life.

The new peasants, unlike their forebears, won’t depend entirely on the land. But unlike their parents, they’ll understand that the bright lights of the knowledge economy and the baubles of the technological dream can’t give us what food always has: a visceral connection with the world around us and with each other.

• You can find many other posts on food and hunger published today via the Blog Action Day website or #BAD11

Time to invest in the optimists

2011-10-13T09:51:00.000+01:00

We've been hearing a lot about optimism lately. David Cameron last week invoked the British bulldog spirit in a speech that suggested all we need is strong leadership (his leadership) and to stop being 'soggy'.

So how's it looking out there in the real world? Have we got cause for a new wave of optimism?

Look at the big picture and you might think not. Here's a random selection of recent highlights. At a global scale, we've seen the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation warning of continued price volatility and the best part of a billion people at risk of hunger. Small, import-dependent countries are most at risk, it says (the UK, by the way, hasn't been self-sufficient in food for well over 200 years).

Let's come closer to home. Here's the British Retail Consortium, making the most of a slight increase in consumer spending last month:

'Underlying conditions remain weak. Spending growth is below inflation, meaning customers are buying less than last year.'

What that means is the prospect of consumers spending the UK out of recession looks bleak. And given that retail accounts for around 14% of employment in the UK, that's worrying.

There's reason to be worried. Take a look at the latest report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, not known for its tendency to scaremonger. In the next two years median income is likely to fall by 7%, the biggest drop since the oil crisis of the 1970s. More than 3m children will be living in poverty.

Dig behind the figures and you'll find the squeeze isn't being applied evenly. A recent report by the Resolution Foundation found that even when the economy was growing, the living standards of the bottom half of the workforce weren't growing at the same rate. In the five years from 2003 to 2008 the economy grew by 11%, but median wages didn't shift. That's because more of the profits have stayed in the hands of the top earners or been distributed to shareholders, while low earners have become more dependent on state support.

So where is the cause for optimism? Not in public school pep talks about leadership or in economic strategies dreamed up by the consultants at Micawber and Pangloss.

This week I've been talking to people who make me optimistic because they're taking action, using the resources they have to make a difference. People like Jon Fitzmaurice, who runs Selp-help Housing, giving people tools and advice to take over empty homes and bring them back into use. People like Dan Thompson, who's been doing a similar job through the Empty Shops Network, reusing the empty shops blighting our high streets. People like Tessy Britton, who's creating a series of Community Lover's Guidesto help people celebrate what they value about their towns and cities.

There are many more like them. They don't have great personal wealth or the backing of corporations. But they're using the crisis we face as an opportunity to build a better world. What they have in common is that they're not prepared to wait for an imagined recovery or a change of government - they're ready to get on, using the tools and contacts and resources at their disposal.

If David Cameron really wants to build a more optimistic country, he needs to invest in the people with ideas that will create lasting change. He needs to invest in the optimists.

• This post first appeared in the Huffington Post

In praise of the Peak District

2011-10-08T18:26:00.000+01:00

Sheffield, a city of cliffs and corners and edges, echoes the topography of the Peak District more than any of the other cities on the borders.

The Peak District is a landscape that stands aloof from the human activity it hosts. Weathered outcrops of limestone are kneaded by the elements into strange shapes, as if Henry Moore had been given the world to play with. Sheffield too has edges and precipitous drops, a topography that puts the built environment in its place and demonstrates the transience of human artifact despite centuries of chiselling and hammering.

That relationship between the human and the earth we walk on can get lost in a city. Part of the value of our National Parks is that they provide a place where an urbanised population can rediscover perspective and our connections with the land that sustains us.

What was true for a population of industrial workers sixty years ago, when the Peak District became England’s first National Park, is still: we all need places to rest and walk and think. At a time when the sugar-hit leisure habits of bought experience are vanishing beyond the means of many, the opportunity to experience landscape for no more than the cost of a pair of boots and a bus fare is more important than ever.

Jim Dixon, chair of the Peak District National Park Authority, writes eloquently of how this landscape has helped to bring meaning to people’s lives, from victims of violent crime to children in care. When times are hard, this value comes into its own, because it helps put life in perspective.

Stand on a rocky outcrop on Derwent Edge or Higger Tor, or watch the city lights at dusk from the surrounding moorland, and you can’t avoid noticing you’re part of something much bigger than everyday human activity. It’s a great place to question and reassess the value of what you do and the reasons why you do it.

Watching the antics of economists and politicians in recent weeks, a stranger to our society might conclude the purpose of our existence was to achieve economic growth. A walk in the Peak District puts that in perspective: the value of economic activity lies in its contribution to our quality of life, and when quality of life is sacrificed in the process, the bargain is broken.

So the purpose of a National Park is not just to provide space for leisure and a sense of the picturesque. As those who helped to open the Peak District to the public through the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass realised, being in touch with landscape enables us to examine and challenge the norms and conventions that tend to rule our lives.

We need more of these spaces. Over the last 60 years we have made huge strides in opening up our countryside. Now it may be time to turn to our cities and learn from their landscape, uncovering places where we can think, question and reshape the world we live in.

What can Manchester teach the Tories about the economy?

2011-10-02T13:55:00.000+01:00

It's somehow appropriate that the Conservative Party should be holding its conference in Cottonopolis at a time when the chickens of unchecked capital are coming home to roost. Could the city that was once the hub of globalisation tell us something about our future?

For a couple of decades Manchester's had a kind of renaissance, turning the legacy of industry into the symbols of consumption: warehouses morphed into swish apartments, exchanges into eateries. While some Mancunians enjoyed the pleasures of affluence, much of the real trade and inventiveness moved to the other side of the planet.

Meanwhile, outside the retail Mecca of the city centre, much of Manchester has never felt the benefits of that credit-driven and publicly funded resurgence. One Mancunian friend lamented to me the other week that people's aspirations were so low that during the summer riots they looted the pound shops.

Wealth and pride, poverty and depression have always sat cheek by jowl in Manchester. Can a Conservative party that not so long ago proclaimed its conversion to progressive principles come up with a plan for a better economy?

Andrew Tyrie, chairman of the Commons Treasury select committee, came up with one version at the weekend. It was a familiar recipe: reduce regulation, curb employment rights and cut taxation.

Initiatives such as localism, the big society and the green agenda were 'at best irrelevant', he argued. On climate change, in particular, he hinted that environmental action was a luxury we could not afford:

'The Coalition should re- examine measures, such as the carbon floor price, that are more rigorous than those undertaken by other EU countries. It should also reopen with international partners, particularly in the EU, a debate over the economic consequences of its proposed route to decarbonisation and reconsider its speed of trajectory, too.'

What he means, in simple terms, is that we shouldn't go faster than other countries in reducing carbon emissions because it may be bad for British business. This is a slow bicycle race to oblivion, sacrificing the resource base for the next generation's economy for the sake of cheaper business costs today.

A couple of months back Manchester came up with a different approach. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority's climate change strategy, published entirely without fanfare at the end of July, proposes a 48% reduction in carbon emissions. That means investing in technologies, design and ways of behaviour that both reduce the environmentally damaging effects of the city and position it for survival and success in a much more uncertain future - one in which human beings must come to terms with their consumption of resources and learn to live as if they intend to stay on this planet.

There is of course a world of difference between writing a strategy and actually doing anything. But it at least means that Manchester is starting to face in the right direction. It will be interesting to see which vision of the future the greenest government ever signs up to.

You can download the Greater Manchester climate change strategy here (pdf), or read Phil Korbel or Steve Connor's blogs about it. Andrew Tyrie's paper is here (pdf).

For more on why we can't keep consuming resources at our current rate, see this talk by Chandran Nair.

Time to change the message to the jobless

2011-09-29T21:31:00.001+01:00

‘I am starting to have dark moments,’ Dan told me this week. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do when the money runs out.’

It’s been nine months since his organisation, responsible for a housing programme in northwest England, closed down. With a year’s redundancy pay, Dan’s in a better position than some. But none of his job applications have been successful, and his efforts to find freelance work have brought him a lot of sympathy but no money to speak of.

With two teenage daughters, he wonders how they’re going to get through university. He worries what he can cut out to pay the bills. At what should be the most productive time of his life, he’s lowering his sights and binning his ambitions. Like the many years’ work he dumped in a skip because nobody was interested in learning from it, he feels wasted.

Diane never got as far up the professional ladder as Dan. She works ten hours a week as a debt adviser, and looks after her son. For a long time she’s known how to stretch her finances, just as she’s helped many others with theirs. But she’s heard that the funding for the charity she works for is running out. Nobody tells her anything, but she’s not sure how she’ll cope if her job goes.

It’s not as if getting work is easy. Another friend was recruiting an admin worker in Wigan last week. There were nearly 170 applicants for the job, which pays £7 an hour for 20 hours a week. Seven were shortlisted for interview. At least two interviewees were people who’d recently been made redundant. For the one successful applicant, there’ll be a sigh of relief and a new start; for nearly 170 others, another slap in the face.

These are just ordinary, everyday stories. That’s the point. It isn’t just the experience of job loss or lack of opportunity that’s grinding people down; it’s the much more widespread fear that it’s just around the corner, that there’s nothing to look forward to.

I’m an optimist. I believe we can spend our time usefully and productively whether we’re in work or not. I think we all have a contribution to make, and shouldn’t have to lead lives of fear and anxiety. We need to be encouraged and supported to make that contribution, and that in turn can help us back into the workplace.

But that’s not the message that people out of work get. Read @Puffles2010’s experience of being treated like a difficult seven-year-old by JobCentre staff in Cambridge, or this jobseeker, who was told by her local council that the internet was a luxury she could manage without.

What do we hear from our political leaders? Vacuous promises of growth tomorrow with no understanding of how it can be achieved, empty praise for business with no strategy to ensure business can keep going, let alone help those at the bottom of the heap; and constant blame for those who, for one reason or another, have lost hope.

The political consensus is that if you’re out of work it’s probably your fault. Then they wonder why some feel they have no stake in society.

• I’ve changed names to avoid embarrassing individuals who are already having a hard time. Picture courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Who’ll give us a something for something culture - the Milibands or the Marys?

2011-09-27T13:12:00.000+01:00

I met a real leader at the weekend. Whether she’s introducing an event with nationally acclaimed speakers or getting her hands dirty growing vegetables, Mary is unstoppable.

We’re hearing a lot about another leader this week. Today Ed Miliband sets out his vision for the Labour Party, a vision of a ‘something for something’ society.

Mary is already showing how a ‘something for something’ society works. She doesn’t demand, she gives - and by giving inspires others. Mary used to have a job as a community development worker in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, until public sector cuts kicked in and she was made redundant. Without a job, she’s still working her socks off developing her community.

Ed Miliband wants to reward ‘graft’ and says the real wealth creators are the people who go out to work, day in, day out. Mary knows about a different kind of graft - the kind that creates living fruit trees from unpromising-looking bits of rootstock - and demonstrates that by bringing people together, change can happen. With her fellow volunteers at Incredible Edible Todmorden she illustrates Ruskin’s famous dictum that there is no wealth but life.

Ed Miliband is joining forces with David Cameron in labelling council tenants as antisocial scroungers, insinuating that people who live in social housing or claim welfare benefits just want something for nothing. Mary works with people’s potential, showing how we can all play a part in building a better world, whatever our circumstances.

Today Ed Miliband challenged businesses and the public to decide whether they were ‘producers or predators’. The new bargain in society, he said, was ‘co-operation not conflict’. In Todmorden, they’ve been putting that into practice for three years.

Ed Miliband has to walk a tightrope of political judgements and, like all politicians, obsesses about how his statements will play with TV audiences and the public. His orations are not a vision of the future so much as an echo of conventional wisdom. Mary, on the other hand, isn’t bothered about impressions, says what she thinks and speaks from the heart.

I’ve no doubt Ed Miliband means well and will do his best, should he ever be elected. And I’m sure Mary would have no time for the niceties of high office and would lose patience with the pollsters and pundits on day one.

But if we’re looking for leadership, Mary gets my vote every time.

• I've blogged elsewhere about Incredible Edible Todmorden so won't repeat it here. See this post or this one, for example.

Alone in the city

2011-09-19T21:17:00.001+01:00

I’ve been reading Owen Hatherley’s entertainingly contrarian Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, a celebration of our country’s Brutalist heritage and an angry rant at New Labour architecture. Hatherley, inevitably, spends a lot of time talking about Sheffield’s Park Hill estate.

Living here, I hear quite a few opinions about Park Hill. There are horror stories and love stories. There are reasons why the building ended up being thought of as a slum, and most of them were nothing to do with its design.

Park Hill is now undergoing a costly, controversial and excrutiatingly slow refurbishment designed to appeal to lovers of urban chic rather than ordinary working families. Originally, it was designed to replicate the bustle of the terraces it replaced, with a central area including a school, pubs, shops and community centre.

A place designed for sociability and interaction ended up gaining a reputation for all the wrong sorts of interaction, and the result was a retreat from public spaces. To differing degrees that’s happening everywhere. Often this retreat is a consequence of affluence rather than poverty. In most towns and cities I know, the richer people are, the more they cut themselves off from others.

Some are happy with this distance and isolation. But many are not. They might hate the idea of the closeness and encounters associated with a place like Park Hill, but they’re still desperate for contact and companionship. And the fewer people we rely on to provide ir, the more easily it’s lost.

Last week I was at the launch of a new programme of research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, looking at why people are lonely and what can be done about it within neighbourhoods. A study by the Mental Health Foundation found that 36% of young adults - the ones you’d expect to have a lively social life - worry about loneliness. Nearly a quarter of all people worry about being lonely, and just over one in ten feel lonely often.

Why does that matter? There’s an economic argument, which is that people who are lonely are more likely to become depressed and withdraw from society; they become less able to work and, in the worst cases, unable to work at all.

For the number-crunchers in government, and for employers, that’s important. But what really matters is that so many people are unable to enjoy life and live it to the full.

It doesn’t appear to take much to get people talking about it. For the last few months volunteers in Bradford and York have been out on the streets asking people whether they feel loneliness is a problem in society, and the answer is overwhelmingly affirmative, whether the question is put to Asian women in the poorer areas of Bradford Moor or relatively affluent villagers in Denholme.

Men, it seems, are far less willing to talk about it than women, but when they do their comments speak volumes. One told researchers how he sat in a ‘box’ on his own at work and commuted there and back in another box, his car. No wonder so many find yet another box, the TV, such a lifeline.

One of the things the JRF programme will look at is how to break the cycle of loneliness. Is it possible, for example, to ‘design out’ loneliness in housing developments or town centres, creating places that encourage interaction? Can we use ideas like car-sharing or time banks to get people talking to each other?

Most new buildings are designed to encourage privacy and security, sometimes aggressively so. Often it is a reaction to the utopian ideals of the designers of places like Park Hill, and a response to perceived customer demand. But far from being safer, the occupants simply become more isolated. One answer may be to avoid leaving design to the designers: people, not builders, create interactions. What the architects and designers need to do is give them the space to make those human connections easy, safe and frequent.

In the meantime, here’s my favourite bit of graffiti from Park Hill, a triumph of human interaction over built form.

Nasty, brutish and long - the future of life in the north?

2011-09-17T13:56:00.000+01:00

It sounds like a new twist on that joke about how many electricians it takes to change a light bulb. How many universities does it take to tell us we’re all getting older?

The answer, it seems, is eight. The collective brains of eight of our top-notch northern institutions have released copious studies on the effects of demographic change on the North of England economy. In short, there are going to be more of us; more of us are going to be past retirement age; more of us will need long term care or have illnesses that limit our ability to work; and there will be fewer workers left in the workforce to support all these people.

Cheery stuff. No wonder the government’s preferred solution is for more of us to work longer. As universities minister David Willetts pointed out at the launch of the research last week, the pension age isn’t keeping up with our increases in life expectancy.

This is a far cry from those halcyon days when futurists used to tell us that technological advances would mean we’d all live lives of leisured prosperity. In the new economy, it seems, life for many will be nasty, brutish and long.

There’s a wealth of data in the universities’ research, which will be helpful to local enterprise partnerships and others in measuring the height of the mountain they have to climb. While there are hotspots of growth across the region (Manchester and Leeds in particular) skilled people are moving out and these hotspots may have to support increasingly deprived and disconnected hinterlands.

After years of regeneration initiatives, why is the North of England still such a poor relation in economic terms? One clue was given at the launch event by Alan Harding, director of the Institute for Political and Economic Governance at Manchester University: while specific funding was targeted at deprived areas until last year, just about every other form of government investment has favoured London and the south-east.

University research funds, for example, gravitate towards the ‘golden triangle’ of London, Oxford and Cambridge. Infrastructure projects overwhelmingly favour the south (think Crossrail and the Olympic investment, and the plans for high-speed rail, which if anything will entrench London’s status as the place where business is done).

One ray of hope the academics seized on is that a wave of entrepreneurial elders will be unleashed across the north of England. Armed with the accumulated wealth of the baby boomer generation, they’ll invest in new businesses that will create new jobs and opportunities.

Well, that may happen. Whether there will be enough ‘silver entrepreneurs’, with enough ready capital and enough disposable income, to make a difference across the region, is questionable. How many will readily risk their pensions to start new ventures is even more questionable.

It’s suggested, too, that there will be a boom for housebuilders as more of us need homes we can stay in for longer, and big new markets in care technologies. This may be the case - but it raises the spectre of growing inequalities between those who can afford the smart homes and healthcare gizmos, and those who can’t. It’s hard to imagine councils footing the bill for state-of-the-art care homes.

All of which pushes to the fore the question about what kind of economy and society we want. The think tank IPPR North has set up a Northern Economic Futures Commission which will try to find some answers, and I posted some optimistic pointers to the kind of vision it needs to develop a couple of months ago.

We face some stark choices, and for all the government’s talk of rebalancing the economy, there’s little evidence of coherent policy. Will the north become a place where public spending provides an even more minimal safety net for the have-nots while a shrinking group of the well-off live the life of Riley? Or will we start to behave as if we really mean all that rhetoric about fairness and begin to build a diverse, inventive economy where everyone has a role?

What's the prognosis for the big society?

2011-09-11T18:18:00.000+01:00

Reports of the death of the big society have been exaggerated. The question is whether it can stay alive.

The Telegraph made a great deal the other day of the fact that the big society, David Cameron’s ‘passion’ and philosophical driving force, would not be on the main agenda at the Conservative Party conference. The implication was that, 18 months after the first of its many launches, it had been quietly moored in the backwaters of policy.

The enthusiasm displayed in the early days of the coalition government has certainly waned. The Lib Dems have always been wary of the term and tend to avoid using it. Among the Tories, where at one time every policy initiative or press release was accompanied by fulsome quotes about ‘big society in action’, ministerial cheerleading has become surprisingly muted.

Every now and again the big society stages a modest comeback. In June the Department of Communities and Local Government celebrated the achievements of the three ‘vanguard’ councils (there were four, but we don’t talk about Liverpool). These included the first brick being laid in a community-run housing development in Cumbria. There is also a ‘citizens’ university’ in Sutton, south London, and a planned ‘CareBank’ scheme in Windsor and Maidenhead.

These are all worthwhile, but fall short of local government minister Greg Clark’s assertion that the vanguards have ‘achieved remarkable results in a year’.

The growing ennui over big society within government reflects the mood on the streets, where the term is most often used ironically, except among charities and community groups still desperately hoping that adopting the lingo will win them friends in the right places.

But while the big society has slipped down the political agenda, the ‘broken society’ and ‘sick society’ certainly haven’t. David Cameron used last month’s riots as a platform to set out what he describes as ‘the broken society agenda’.

‘Our security fightback must be matched by a social fightback,’ the prime minister said. ‘Do we have the determination to confront the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations?’

The problems were defined as ‘Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences’, which is as precise a description of the behaviour of leading bankers, currency speculators, members of Parliament and media barons in recent years as it is of the actions of street criminals. And there lies the problem for the big society.

David Cameron says the reason he is in politics is to build a bigger, stronger society. But you don’t build a bigger, stronger society by telling people how sick and broken and useless they are. You are more likely to do it by working with the assets and talents and skills and generosity that exist even in the most struggling communities, and by getting alongside and supporting people. It’s a process of working with individuals and groups to give them space to explore and articulate their own ambitions, and the support they need to start making them a reality.

Within the early rhetoric of the big society, and in many of the awards for community action handed out by Number 10, there was real respect for ordinary people’s achievements and ability to address and change horrendous situations.

That is in danger of being lost and replaced with an approach that uses the language of empowerment but sees the people as the problem. If that persists, there is scant chance of such a poorly parented big society surviving beyond infancy.

That's how the light gets in

2011-09-04T15:24:00.001+01:00

Joan Miro, the Catalan painter who was one of the defining figures of 20th century art, would have been an accountant if his parents’ ambitions had been fulfilled. Instead he chose a life that, despite early fame and success, was often at the margins of society.

A major retrospective of Miro’s work is just coming to an end at London’s Tate Modern, and I was lucky to catch it yesterday. Going through room after room of artworks (which in themselves represent only part of his output) you can’t help being awed by the energy and creativity that lasted well into old age.

At a time when most accountants would be filing away their ledgers to concentrate on their golf, Miro was still using his art to challenge the world around him. His triptych The Hope of a Condemned Man (above), produced in his eightieth year, was both a judgement on Franco’s dictatorship in Spain and an exploration of humanity that reaches far beyond politics.

Art and culture are too easily commodified, both for economic and political ends. I’ve seen no end of reports arguing that we should invest in the arts because it is good for tourism or will bring footfall to town centres; and there is no end to politicians’ willingness to hijack culture for political ends. In the UK we still have excruciating memories of Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’.

A few weeks ago I visited the new Hepworth in Wakefield. This, together with the nearby Yorkshire Sculpture Park, is a joyous celebration of form and landscape, a visualisation of elements of being and emotion that get pushed to the edges of everyday life.

Yet locally the discussion is all about whether, at a cost of £35m, the Hepworth can help to revive Wakefield’s fortunes. The gallery is considered in terms of the financial return on public spending, and in terms of whether its value in kick-starting the local economy is greater or less than the value in spending an equivalent amount on frontline public services like social work or education.

Peter Box, the council’s leader, was quoted earlier this year as saying the ‘real debate is the effect on the local economy’.

I agree with Cllr Box that local economies are important, but to see the arts as a form of civic boosterism is to reduce both the arts and the civic to numbers in a spreadsheet. The real debate is whether we have the courage, intelligence and humanity in hard times to keep valuing and exploring the aspects of life that lift us out of the mundane, stretch, surprise and disturb us. That is the value of the Miro exhibition and the Hepworth Gallery, and of countless small-scale art, theatre and music projects around the country.

Our consciousness of self and others, and of what lies beyond self and others, and our ability to explore the edges and depths and margins of being through all kinds of creativity, is one of the things that makes our existence much more than a mere perpetuation of a species. As the singer Leonard Cohen put it: ‘There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.’

The economic benefits, when they come, may be welcome but are incidental. If economic value were the benchmark for what we do with our lives, Miro would have stayed an accountant.

• This video shows the Guardian art critic Adrian Searle discussing The Hope of a Condemned Man.

Will we always have a housing crisis?

2011-08-31T23:39:00.000+01:00

Suddenly, we’re all talking about housing again. And for most of us, it isn’t the tedious exchanges about house prices and home improvements that used to dominate middle-class dinner parties.

Over the last two days i’ve had an on-off conversation with various folk on Twitter, sparked first by the National Housing Federation’s warnings of a housing market crisis, and next by a prediction by the charity Crisis that homelessness will start affecting the middle classes.

I also caught up on the BBC documentary The Great Estate, charting the rise and fall of council housing. The fascinating archive footage and entertaining conversations with old people revisiting homes they’d grown up in were marred by a rather shallow analysis of what went wrong, but that’s TV for you.

So if a documentary only scratches the surface of the issue, what chance a conversation in 140 characters? It’s a bit like trying to summarise the works of Goethe or complexity theory.

Nevertheless a couple of tweets came close. One, from Jo Winterburn in Devon, commented: ‘I know people earning a decent wage living in caravans (not mobile homes) on cheap camp sites as it’s all they can afford.’

Here’s another from Tom Neumark, a councillor in Camden, north London: ‘120 million bedrooms in Britain. Just over 60 million people. And still a housing crisis.’

In short, we’re in trouble. I’m not going to deal here with issues of supply and demand, issues of overcrowding and under-occupation, the tangled mess that is the housing benefit system, the inflated land values that push up building costs, the rampant speculation that has forced home-ownership out of most people’s reach, and the national policies that turned council housing into an option of last resort and imagined that concentrating the poorest, most vulnerable, most damaged and dysfunctional people together would create happy communities.

But it is possible to say something brief about the attitudes and approaches we need to adopt if we are to tackle a problem that has been at the heart of some of our worst economic and social failures.

The first point is about scale. Government policies have typically assumed that gargantuan problems need epic solutions. That’s wrong. A big problem needs small solutions, repeated and adapted on a big scale. That’s why approaches such as self-help, co-ops and community land trusts are important but need investment and support.

The second is about humanity. The solutions begin not with the organisations tasked with addressing the problem, but the people who experience it. The Great Estate showed strikingly how patronising the utopian visions for public housing of the early 20th century were to the people who actually needed the homes, well-intentioned as they were. Today, much social housing management still stems from a rather detached focus on fairness rather than from a concern to support people through crisis and beyond into lives they can enjoy.

Third - and this was a strong theme in The Great Estate too - is the importance of belonging. Individuals, households and neighbourhoods work best when they are not disrupted and threatened. Current policies designed to turn social housing into what is effectively temporary accommodation will remove that sense of belonging and turn people in on themselves rather than out towards their neighbours.

Fourth, we need to encourage ownership. Not just individual ownership, where the obsession with personal property has led to the mis-selling of mortgages and unsustainable indebtedness, but joint or collective ownership at a scale that retains an awareness of personal responsibility and benefit, and encourages stewardship for the good of the wider neighbourhood level and for future generations rather than capital gains.

Fifth - and this comes on top of the other considerations - is cost and affordability. Instead of forcing social rents up to the levels of a market based on excessive property values and expectations of returns, we should be examining ways of reducing costs across the board: bringing down land values, restricting landbanking by housebuilders and developers, and encouraging in-kind contributions such as the ‘sweat equity’ of self-builders.

This isn’t a blueprint for another housing utopia to replace the others that have let us down. But is might be the start of a framework to enable people to live in ways that make sense to them, rather than in ways dictated by the vagaries of the private housing market or the myopia of public policy.

Anyone for bank holiday shopping?

2011-08-29T12:03:00.002+01:00

Unwelcome message: how Westfield's investment was regarded by some locals

Not so long ago British bank holidays were for shopping. Instead of trekking to the beach, with all the attendant risks of hailstorms and chilblains, families would head to a covered, air-conditioned shopping centre with identical potted palms and cheery private security guards, where they could indulge themselves with new outfits and gadgets, asserting their place in society by taking communion at the altar of River Island or KFC.

Many still think we all want nothing more than to resurrect our hunter-gatherer instincts by tracking down, surrounding and dragging home this week’s must-have item, whether it’s an iPad or designer knickers.

Take, for example, the new Westfield, gateway to the 2012 Olympics and the portal through which all seeking to watch Britain’s ultimate sporting spectacle must enter. This is straight out of the old school of retail regeneration, where we reach the pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in the equivalent of a gigantic airport departure lounge, all shiny surfaces and no windows and the honeyed promise of a good time you’ll regret later.

Outside the Olympic cocoon, even Westfield knows a different world is emerging. Last month they quietly announced they were scaling back plans for a new shopping centre in the middle of Bradford - plans that had left the city with a hole known as ‘Wastefield’ for several years before it was turned into the Bradford Urban Garden, a welcome if temporary green space.

Gone are some of the smaller shop units planned; gone too are the speculative offices. However, Westfield Bradford will have Marks and Spencer. Since Bradford already has an M&S, this fills one hole in the city’s fabric by opening up another, but that will not be Westfield’s problem.

There were other warning signals last week. Luminar, the nightclub owner, desperately hopes its debt-ridden operation can be bailed out (at last temporarily) by debt-ridden students during the autumn freshers’ weeks. A consumer confidence survey by Nationwide showed gloomy shoppers were putting off big purchases, and today the Asda Income Tracker reinforced the message with news that average household disposable income had fallen 6.4% in the last year. Meanwhile the Co-op’s chief executive said the retail recession was the worst he’d known in 40 years.

So will we get any wiser as the temples of Mammon crumble around our ears? Well, we’ll all still need to buy and sell stuff, feed and clothe and entertain ourselves, so if retailers, producers and planners can gear themselves to our needs rather than relying on inflating our wants they should do well enough. Meanwhile we punters may start to reassess the amount of bling we all need to live fulfilling lives.

For many that will be painful - not just for consumers, but for the advisers and marketers and strategists whose approach to rescuing every ailing town centre and sickly seaside resort has been to conjure up ways of enticing us to spend more money. They need to wake up to the fact that for more and more of us, the money isn’t there. And for some, it never was there and the stairway to consumer heaven was always roped off.

The last laugh will go not to those left with the loot at the end of the Monopoly game, but to those quickest to understand that the game wasn’t worth playing. As we find better things to do with much of the space in our town centres and shopping malls, even the shopkeepers may end up happier.

Watch out for imaginary lions

2011-08-25T12:56:00.000+01:00

There’s a famous, if aprocryphal, story about the child taught that the Equator was an imaginary line drawn on the globe. She was convinced the teacher had said it was an imaginary lion.

An imaginary lion may be more fun, but can be much more frightening too. And many of the imaginary lines that divide our communities - postcode boundaries, school catchment areas - have turned into imaginary lions.

This isn’t just about gang culture and which ‘end’ you happen to be from. In west Yorkshire there are mums who won’t go half a mile down the road to a new nursery.

One man told me how he moved a matter of a few hundred yards when he was a child. In his new home he was burgled in the first week.

An older woman said he shouldn’t have been surprised. ‘They don’t know who you are, love, when you come over here, across the road,’ she explained.

There’s been a lot of huffing and puffing about social media and its role in inflaming (or preventing) the recent riots in the UK. But the serious question, as Tom Neumark pointed out in this recent post for the RSA, is about how social networks operate.

And ultimately this has to be about learning how to build trust. The more we believe in imaginary lions, the more likely they are to turn into real ones.

The lost valley of Lorgill

2011-08-21T19:01:00.000+01:00

In the Scottish summer rain, the slopes of Lorgill look green and fertile. For around half a mile the valley levels out, catching the moorland waterfalls for a few minutes before plunging into the ice-cold ocean. In winter it is sheltered from the gales that slap the surrounding cliffs with gusts of up to 140 miles an hour. It would be a good, quiet spot for a weary walker to pitch camp rather than trudge for another two hours to reach the scattered homes of Glendale on the northwest corner of Skye.

It would be a good, quiet spot to stay for longer. For many generations people did. Clustered around the sparkling, peat-stained stream lie huddles of whitened rocks. Grass and moss have colonised the gaps between them; thistles splash them with purple. Small piles of them slumber among the buttercups, piles that were once people’s homes.

Memories can lie most comfortably when they lie undisturbed. If we carried the burdens of memory with us, successive generations would stumble and falter under the weight of accumulated losses. So we choose forgetfulness and fossilise the past. Yet fossils are always reappearing in the most unexpected places. And when memory intrudes, it does so with a smack, a challenge to the validity of what survives and remains.

It does that with individual losses. The mental prompt to phone the person who is no longer there; the recollection of an irritating habit that is no longer irritating but accusatory by its absence.

There are bigger losses that are part of the fabric of who we are, as nations and cultures. In 1830 the families who lived in Lorgill were read the following statement by the local sheriff officer:

‘To all the crofters in Lorgill. Take notice that you are hereby duly warned that you all be ready to leave Lorgill at twelve o’clock on the 4th August next with all your baggage but no stock and proceed to Loch Snizort, where you will board the ship Midlothian (Captain Morrison) that will take you to Nova-Scotia, where you are to receive a free grant of land from Her Majesty’s Government. Take further notice that any crofter disobeying this order will be immediately arrested and taken to prison. All persons over seventy years of age and who have no relatives to look after them will be taken care of in the County Poorhouse. This order is final and no appeal to the Government will be considered. God Save the Queen.’

To put it in context, this was just one incident in more than a century of evictions known as the Highland Clearances. And compared with accounts of other evictions, there are no records of homes burned, or sick people abandoned to starve.

To put it in context too, Loch Snizort is a long day’s walk from Lorgill for a fit and healthy person. And the ships that transported evicted crofters to North America to dump them in the middle of nowhere were as notoriously overcrowded and insanitary as the ships used for the slave trade - but without the regulations that applied to them. And while the evictions were carried out by landowners who were often the crofters’ own clan chiefs, they were done - as the Lorgill notice demonstrates - with all the authority of law and government.

These memories, buried, grassed over and eroded by time, are part of what makes Scotland the place it is, and the Highlands and Islands in particular the places they are. It is less than two centuries since the English (and many Scots) actively colluded in the near-destruction of a culture under the banner of ‘improvement’.

As John Prebble, introducing his account of the Highland Clearances in the 1960s, wrote: ‘...we have not become so civilised in our behaviour, or more concerned with men than profit, that this story holds no lesson for us.’

Half a century on, are we starting to learn those lessons? The growing acceptance and interest in community ownership of assets and legislation granting a ‘community right to buy’ may be a start, but there’s a long way to go.

John MacPherson, spokesman for the Glendale crofters in 1883, put it more bluntly. As James Hunter recounts, his message was: ‘We want more land and there is plenty of it in the country.’ Prime minister Gladstone’s answer, in the spirit of the times, was to send a gunboat to enforce the landowners’ property rights. But public opinion - finally - was on the side of MacPherson and his Land Leaguers, and a Royal Commission on crofting, announced the same year, led to legal security of tenure and the end of the clearances (though not the return of the land taken from tens of thousands over the previous century).

In England and Wales a relative handful of people still own more than half the land. As economic circumstances force more of us to depend on our own resources, the return of the land may cease to be a weathered memory and once again become a pressing social demand.

The know-nothing executives and learned helplessness

2011-08-19T00:07:00.000+01:00

I've just been reading a post by the always provocative and challenging Henry Tam, on leadership in the public sector. It reminded me of a conversation I had yesterday with a housing chief, who was lamenting the fact that the housing association movement, which used to be full of people who'd lived in squats and set up co-ops, is now largely run by accountants.

Question the Powerful: The Know-Nothing Executives: Who are the KNEs? The Know-Nothing Executives are a special breed who rise to the top of organisations by knowing nothing except the reward...

It also reminded me of a number of other conversations I've had recently about accountability and responsibility in public services. It isn't just the bosses who come in from outside; it's the ordinary, well-meaning staff who feel disempowered. Take this quote from a head teacher I spoke to a few weeks ago, talking about a school she knows well that has been through four different heads in three years:

'The school got lots of outside help and that clouded any vision they had and they now have staff who don’t think for themselves, they have staff who wait for somebody to tell them what to do, they have learnt helplessness and therefore it doesn’t attract people in...'

This isn't the whole story, obviously. But it's an important part of it. It's why accountability and connection with local people are so important - localism not as a political philosophy or a management theory but as an attitude of genuine public service. If public servants had to have a vote of confidence from the public they serve before any promotion it might concentrate the mind wonderfully.

Why we need sticking people, not sticking plasters

2011-08-16T21:56:00.000+01:00

If you didn’t know where to look, you wouldn’t know there had been a riot in Deighton last week. The streets, with their council semis and Victorian sandstone terraces, don’t scream poverty and desperation, although the views over green hills and woodland on the edge of Huddersfield mask the deprivation that does exist.

The closed Woolpack pub with its smashed windows and the shuttered shops along the main road suggest this is not a thriving area. But the obvious signs of stress aren’t there, apart from an occasional boarded up house - no dumped rubbish in the streets, no burned-out cars, hardly any graffiti.

And the riot was not like the riots the area has had in the past. Last week a group of around 30 young people raided a community centre, ripping out a cash machine, and took the one-armed bandits from the working men’s club. The aim was robbery. Previous disturbances in the early 1990s had been angrier and involved confrontations with the police; this time local residents were calling on the police to tackle the looters.

It’s risky to read too much into one incident. But this is an area where there has been intensive work to stabilise and improve a community that many, especially in public services, had virtually given up on a decade ago. The latest crime statistics suggest that, with the exception of last week’s events, the burglaries that were commonplace have been reduced to below the local average.

You could put this down to the change in the housing make-up of the area (600 empty council homes knocked down and new private homes built) or the good work of the local regeneration agency, the Deighton and Brackenhall Initiative. Both would be true. But it is also down to the personal involvement and commitment of individuals who have been prepared to work with local people for years on end to change outsiders’ perceptions of the area and insiders’ belief in themselves.

Talking to Andi Briggs, the initiative’s chief officer, it was clear that one of the main things that makes regeneration stick is having people who stick - whether they’re the neighbourhood police officer, the housing manager, the community centre manager or the local councillor.

I asked Andi what advice he’d give to David Cameron, who’s vowed to examine every area of social policy to prevent future riots and work intensively with the nation’s 120,000 most troubled families to turn their prospects around before the next election.

‘You can’t do it in the life of a parliament,’ was his immediate response. ‘There are no sticking plasters. You are talking about significant entrenched issues.’

The most important thing he’d learned in ten years of the Deighton and Brackenhall Initiative, he said, is that ‘consistency of people’ is key. Building relationships takes time, and you can’t do that if you’re here today and gone tomorrow.

Maybe instead of appointing entrepreneurs with a sideline in TV shows to share their wisdom, ministers should spend a bit more time in places like Deighton.

• After I wrote this post I came across this account of last week's incident by Mike McCusker, chief executive of Fresh Horizons, which runs the community centre targeted last week. It’s well worth reading.

The insignificance of our riots

2011-08-14T16:22:00.002+01:00

Observing last week’s English riots from north of the border, I was left with a sense of how significant but also how insignificant they were.

The were major news, obviously. And more importantly, they were significant to those caught up in them, burned out of their homes or businesses, attempting to preserve peace on the streets (both police and members of the public), and, most of all, those close to the people who have died - Mark Duggan, shot by police in the incident that unleashed the tempest, Haroon Jahan, Shazad Ali, and Abdul Musavir, killed in Birmingham by a hit-and-run driver, Trevor Ellis, shot dead in Croydon, and Richard Mannington Bowes, set upon after trying to put out a fire in Ealing. Mayhem carries a human price far in excess of the physical damage we have seen.

In a world where 24-hour media demands instant punditry, perceptions can easily become distorted. The images and shock have a power of their own and there is a rush to construct a narrative, to tell a story of the riots that risks becoming more significant than the events themselves.

Previous flashpoints have told their own stories. In 1981 and 1985, riots in Bristol, Liverpool, Brixton and Tottenham were reactions to heavy-handed and racist policing. In 1990 the poll tax riots began as an act of political protest. In 2001 the disturbances in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham had their roots in tensions between different communities and perceptions of injustice.

With the exception of the initial protests in Tottenham, last week’s riots had no such obvious trigger. In many cases it was clearly rioting for the sake of rioting - as one ‘organiser’ suggested, it was an opportunity to get ‘free stuff’. In Enfield, looters were encouraged to ‘just rob everything’. It is telling that while Syrian protesters were last week resisting tanks and artillery in their demands for freedom from tyranny, in England people took to the streets to steal watches and flatscreen TVs. The former is significant. The latter highlights how insignificant we are becoming.

Some commentators have suggested the riots show how alienated many young people are from society: unable to find a future that delivers the material rewards that accompany success, they took the law into their own hands to get what they wanted. It might be truer to say that it shows a depressingly shared view across much of society about what matters in life: a culture that prizes consumption above all will spawn antisocial ways of consuming as well as convivial ones.

There has been much talk of ‘gang culture’ as the root of the problem. But gang culture is in many ways just consumer culture writ large: possession, greed and control are its dominant characteristics. And while a succession of people are now telling the courts that they acted in a moment of madness, few are questioning the underlying madness of a country so emotionally impoverished that stuff has become our preferred route to self-actualisation, within or outside the law.

When the red mist disappears and the supercops have shared their wisdom about gangs and riot control, will much have changed? I suspect not. It may be helpful and desirable to find ways of policing that deter public disorder, but these don’t and can’t address the underlying mentality.

You could say this is to do with parenting or about education, but many of those who took part were reasonably educated and had caring, devoted parents. David Cameron spoke of parts of society that are not just broken but sick. If there is a sickness to be treated, it is one of orientation and aspiration: that we live in a culture where we are predominantly for ourselves rather than for each other.

Treating that sickness is a question of therapy rather than surgery. We can’t simply remove the trouble like a cyst or a tumour, sluicing away the infection with water cannon or isolating it in prison after prison. What we can do - and this is the real test for the politicians and the pundits - is to invest in healing and rebuilding, making sure we spend public money and devote public attention not only to controlling the streets but to creating and telling and beginning to live a better story of the kind of people we want to be.

Let's hear it for the north

2011-07-26T18:39:00.000+01:00

A celebration of skills and industry:
which names will leave their mark in the next century?

This week's GDP growth figures reinforced what we already knew: the UK economy is going nowhere. If there's good news in that, it's that it hasn't nosedived as some predicted. But if we're hoping for a quick fix for our most distressed places, we'll be waiting a long time.

So it's interesting that the think tank Ippr North recently asked for evidence for its Northern Economic Futures Commission.

What would a successful economy look like in the north of England? Would it rival the City of London or simply be the back office, the shelf-stackers and van drivers for the rich and successful elsewhere?

My fear is that much of the evidence put to the commission may simply call for more government investment to give us a short-lived competitive advantage in attracting footloose global investors. My hope is that this will be a chance to articulate a really strong case for an economy that builds on the strengths of place and people in a part of the UK that has fallen behind for too long.

So here's a starter for ten - not a worked up response, but some pointers to areas I think the commission needs to consider. If these appeal to you as a basis for a collaborative submission, please get in touch and let's see how we can move this forward.

A successful northern economy is one that offers opportunities for everyone. This means focusing on developing practical skills that meet real needs, not just on high-end skills for top graduates. It means actively working to provide opportunities in areas that have been left behind for most of the last 25 years.
A successful northern economy is one that does not compromise on sustainability. It should prioritise development of low-carbon products and services to replace costly, energy intensive approaches. It will make the most of the region’s renewable natural resources and invest in green infrastructure.
A successful northern economy is one that reduces its dependency on other parts of the world and on national government support. This means ensuring our money supports local and regional businesses, and strengthening links between the north’s businesses and communities. There should be a clear correlation between incentives for business and firms‘ contribution to local training, skills development and community wellbeing.
A successful northern economy will reinvigorate its heritage of making and manufacturing, from small-scale artisans to the larger-scale industries required to harness renewable energy and create sustainable transport and construction sectors. It will value vocational and practical skills as well as advanced technical and intellectual skills.
A successful northern economy is one that encourages distinctiveness and diversity, rethinking towns and cities to meet the social, cultural and educational needs of all their people for the future, not just the commercial requirements of the present. It will offer free and low-cost workspace to social and commercial start-ups, use its pension and insurance funds as regional investment capital and celebrate and care for the region’s urban and rural landscapes.
A successful northern economy will value the contribution of voluntary and community organisations and see them as part of the business community in their own right. It will encourage working conditions and lifestyles that allow people to play a full part in society and offer each other social support.
A successful northern economy will support local ownership through cooperative and mutual approaches and seek to put land and other wealth-producing assets into the hands of local people and organisations.
A successful northern economy will put quality of life and quality of place before short-term financial gains, recognising that future wellbeing as well as current affluence is a key measure of success.
A successful northern economy will build on the heritage of skills and enterprise in all places, not just in cities considered economic drivers. It will value the vernacular, rather than trying to be like everywhere else. It will invest in the necessary technologies (including high speed rural broadband) to support this and build a culture of support and facilitation among local and central government agencies.
A successful northern economy will be one where experimentation is encouraged and those who succeed reinvest in future wellbeing by supporting the region’s social and commercial entrepreneurs.

Are you a vampire, a survivor or an adventurer?

2011-07-24T23:50:00.000+01:00

Over the last couple of years I’ve noticed a growing number of vampires. Not quite dead themselves, they sustain themselves on the blood of the living, frequently turning others into creatures like them.

Those who turn into vampires typically do so in response to the end of a consultancy contract or the loss of a job in the public sector. These vampires, unlike their mythological counterparts, will often hunt in packs, gathering under the protection of large corporations and preying on those with ideas and imagination. You can find them stalking the corridors of LinkedIn, where the undead congregate in search of new victims.

The vampire has only one objective: to discover fresh blood and consume it. As economic stagnation drags on, some become more desperate and clumsy in their attempts to entrap the living. Unfortunately others become highly sophisticated and successful.

Those who are not vampires start to learn survival skills. Sometimes this will involve identifying and fleeing from potential predators. Usually it will mean learning how to avoid hunting in the same places as the vampires or using their methods. Survivors learn to share the little they have because they know they will sometimes need to beg; and they learn to make do with less rather than leech on others.

I meet more survivors than vampires, although they often have less to say for themselves. They are getting by, but it can be hard going and the sense of gloom can be palpable. These are the people who hope against hope that they’ll find a role in an organisation similar to the one that has dumped them, or set up as freelances hoping to reclaim some of the work they’ve lost. Often they are brave and determined.

Being a survivor is an important skill in difficult times, and I’ve been impressed by the number of people I know who have survived redundancy, reduced hours or the removal of work for which they’ve given years of energy. I wish them all the best of luck.

There’s another group I’ve noticed, though. These are the adventurers, who respond to difficulty and tough times by coming up with new ideas and sticking with the issues they care about. They have many of the qualities of survivors, but something more: a readiness to step out and do something different.

Successful adventurers don’t take stupid risks, but neither do they try to hibernate and hope for better times. They include people like Dan Thompson of the Empty Shops Network, who is promoting the High Street Hundred as a way of keeping his good work going when funders fall away; Martin Simon, who used Buzzbnk as a way of getting his book on timebanking published; or Jon Fitzmaurice, whose tireless advocacy of self-help housing is starting to bear fruit.

Those are just the first three examples that come to mind, and there are many more (see the recent Compendium for the Civic Economy, for example). What these people have in common is a conviction of the wider worth of what they’re doing that goes a long way beyond earning a living and putting bread on the table. They don’t curl up in a corner when the going gets tough, and the last thing they do is seek to survive at others’ expense.

All the signs are that the autumn will bring us more challenges and fewer resources. If we’re going to defeat the vampires, we’ll need many more adventurers.

A welcome in the hillsides

2011-07-21T23:46:00.001+01:00

I learned a new word the other day. A ‘comer-inner’ is the local term in parts of Huddersfield for a stranger or foreigner - even if that foreignness consists of nothing more than belonging to the neighbouring estate.

Over the last week I’ve been doing a series of interviews as part of an evaluation of a regeneration scheme, the Deighton and Brackenhall Initiative, that has been working for the last ten years to turn around an area once regarded as a place to avoid at all costs. I’m not going to try to digest more than 20 hours of recordings here, but over the summer a separate blog will start to build up a picture of the area and how it has changed.

The concept of the ‘comer-inner’ isn’t unique to Brackenhall and Deighton, but it is revealing. The area has always been poor: Brackenhall was built as a slum clearance scheme in the 1940s. Local people have often felt harassed and mistreated by figures of authority, from the council officers who allocate tenancies to the police. Hardship has created strong bonds between many residents.

But as well as having a tight-knit core of residents, the area has also seen constant arrivals, often of the most vulnerable people - asylum seekers, lone parents, people with problems of drug or alcohol abuse. Sometimes new arrivals were welcomed. Sometimes they didn’t know what had hit them.

One woman told me hers was one of the first mixed-race families on her estate. She had to endure lighted fireworks pushed through the letter box and ‘hard snowballs’ in the winter. Her family stuck it out. Many others didn’t. As one longstanding resident said, ‘you have to have a certain edge to you to survive’. A typical welcome would be to have your house burgled. There were good reasons why the ‘comer-inners’ felt vulnerable and often left within weeks.

This doesn’t happen now. Crime has fallen drastically and all the statistics say the area’s much safer. Many of today’s comer-inners live in smart private housing rather than in council houses. But there are still tensions and resentments.

When times are tough, such tensions and resentments come to the surface. What is striking about Deighton and Brackenhall is that even when most of the country was prospering, times were still tough. Often that hardship is exacerbated by public policy; occasionally those in authority manage to work in a way that builds up people’s self-esteem and ability to contribute to their families and community.

Across the UK many initiatives that support such areas are grinding to a halt, or struggling on with minimal support. History suggests that governments only tend to wake up to the need to support the most hard-pressed areas when there’s a riot or a disaster. So it’s not surprising that ‘comer-inners’ are regarded with hostility and suspicion, whether they’re middle-class professionals or neighbours who are different and vulnerable.

The current government, like its predecessor, talks a lot about outcomes. Rather than throwing money at problems, we should focus on what really makes a difference. It’s a fine aspiration. One outcome we should look for, I’d suggest, is communities where ‘comer-inners’ are welcomed - welcomed because local people are no longer so disadvantaged or damaged that they see newcomers as a threat, and because new arrivals are seen as contributing to the diversity and vitality of a community. To achieve that you need to work on some really deep-rooted issues, and to do it for as long as it takes.

Rupert Murdoch's gift to democracy

2011-07-13T22:55:00.000+01:00

The downfall of Rupert Murdoch, even if it’s only temporary, has been painted as a triumph of Parliament against a corrupt media machine. And so, to some extent, it is.

But it also exposes the shortcomings of institutions across the board: the succession of governments who preferred to keep the press onside and were more or less happy to work through cosy relationships and well-placed leaks and briefings; the journalists and reporters who, with some honourable exceptions, followed the pack rather than their vocation; the police who worked through similarly cosy (if not corrupt) connections.

And let’s not forget that it’s only just over a year since the Telegraph exposed the scandal of MPs’ expenses, attracting attention more for the vices they revealed than for those they employed in their investigation. If we’re looking for heroes and villains, we may need to rethink our assumptions. It was fascinating to watch how quickly Parliament’s united front against evil got bogged down in party political mire in Wednesday’s Commons debate.

Away from the Great Wen, it’s just as difficult to draw clear lines between the heroes and villains. And so it should be.

On Tuesday I was at the annual conference of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, listening to debates about how we could make places better. Neil McInroy, the CLES chief executive, issued a rallying cry for a ‘just localism’ - one that combined local power with equality and strong leadership from local government.

Maurice Glasman, Labour’s guru of the moment, brought to bear a Saul Alinsky-style analysis of power, attacking the failures of (among others) trade unions who lack a vision beyond their members’ interests and local government officials whom he described as ‘very well paid people with degrees in social sciences who don’t see or care about the workers around them’.

The role of local government came up, too, in a workshop I was helping to lead on the ‘big society’. The debate was around representative versus participative democracy - a false distinction, I think, but one that tends to arouse strong differences between passionate defenders of a representative system that struggles to attract interest from more than a third of voters once a year at local level, and a participatory approach that deeply involves the interested and active but not the majority.

In all of these debates there’s a tendency to look for someone to blame. We all want to blame Murdoch, and we probably should. Many of us like to blame politicians. National government and some community organisations like to blame local government. But when we’ve finished hounding out everyone who’s flawed or who’s failed, there will be very few of us left.

The point of accountability is that it works in the round. If the inquiries announced last week are only about holding the press to account, their value will be limited. If local politics is only about holding politicians or officers to account, it will also fail. A working democracy is one where nobody can hide - business, press, politician or administrator - but where we all know we’re accountable to each other. The News International hacking scandal may just be the crisis we need to help us start to reinvent democracy as well as journalism.

Public service reform: watch out for speed traps

2011-07-11T20:34:00.000+01:00

You know how it is. You’re cruising along at a steady pace and the road looks clear. There’s a long straight stretch ahead and you’re in a hurry. You hardly notice the pressure of your foot on the accelerator.

There’s the flash of the camera and you check the speedometer. Too late - but it could have been worse. These days many police forces will offer you a speed awareness course rather than prosecute.

Most speeding offences are the result of not paying attention or not knowing the rules. Every now and again, though, what can go wrong does go wrong: someone gets hit, or you trash the car.

The same is true of government. On Monday the UK government released its white paper on ‘open public services’ - open to anyone, that is, on the grounds that this will end a ‘Whitehall knows best’ culture and break up what David Cameron calls ‘public service monopolies’.

The government has been cruising down this road for some time, and with increasing disregard for the potential hazards. But there are speed traps ahead.

The premise behind the white paper is that if we, the public, have more say and control over public services such as libraries, education and social care, they will be better. The closer the management is to the people who use the services, the more responsive they are likely to be.

This is a fair and reasonable starting point. Against it are considerations of economies of scale, standards - and the possibility that the service might disappear altogether if it is not provided by central or local government. The white paper tries to balance these considerations, but with an emphasis on change rather than protecting what we have.

The risk, though, is that services will not be designed around what people want or what works best, but around a political imperative that insists they are broken and need fixing (David Cameron describes public service reform as 'a job that urgently needs to be done'). At the same time the effects of spending cuts already being implemented will be to heighten the risk of failure: it’s like driving in a snowstorm where you can’t see more than a few yards ahead and your grip on the surface is limited.

On speed awareness courses they have a little mnemonic to remind you of the principles of ‘defensive driving’ (that is, how to avoid being the victim of other people’s stupidity). It’s COAST, which stands for concentration, observation, anticipation, space and time. Policymakers should apply it to public service reforms.

So here are the five principles for intelligent policymaking and designing better services:

Concentration. Don’t get distracted by events (even huge events like the phone hacking scandal).
Observation. Look at what’s happening out there. How are public services being affected by current spending cuts? Who’s waiting in the wings to pick up contracts and what are their objectives? What is the state of the community organisations who are supposed to be empowered by these changes - are they ready, willing and able?
Anticipation. What could go wrong? Who would suffer as a result? How can we make sure we don’t have another Southern Cross?
Space. Do we have room for manoeuvre or are policies that claim to open services up really boxing them in? Do the proposals create more options or take them away?
Time. Do we have time to engage in intelligent planning? Is there time to involve the people who use public services in specifying what they want and how they would like it provided, and is there time to work through conflicts and choices? Is there time to cope with the unexpected?

Just one other speed awareness fact policymakers might like to consider. The faster you drive, the less able you are to respond to disaster and the more likely you are to kill someone. The faster you try to implement policy, the less your ability to handle unintended consequences.

Wake up! The big society cavalry aren't coming

2011-06-29T16:07:00.000+01:00

Anyone familiar with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings will recall the scene. Whether you’ve read the book, seen the film or both, there are few things more stirring than the Riders of Rohan storming to the rescue of the besieged forces of Gondor.

Tolkien does it on an epic scale, with thousands of horsemen galloping around the shoulder of the mountain to bring hope to the beleaguered forces of goodness and justice. But it’s a familiar metaphor: whether your penchant is for medieval adventures or Westerns, people always put their faith in the cavalry.

The bad news in austerity Britain is that there are no cavalry (and if there were, their lances would have been decommissioned). Whether your concern is cuts to voluntary services, the decimation of local government, the demise of high streets and town centres, or the stagnation of the economy, there is nobody riding to the rescue and no realistic prospect of it happening.

The worse news is that in much public debate, people still talk as if they believe the cavalry will one day appear over the brow of the hill and normal service will be resumed. Supporters of the government expect an army of entrepreneurs to mount their steeds and rescue the economy; its opponents imagine opposition politicians will somehow transform themselves from donkeys to chargers.

David Cameron’s version of the cavalry is the big society. I don’t share the commonly held view that the big society is a figleaf for the cuts; I think many in and around government genuinely believed volunteers, community organisations, social entrepreneurs and philanthropists would move into the ground left by a retreating state. Instead, as spending cuts take effect and the political concept of the big society drifts, we’re seeing something more akin to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, the elite troops of the big society often staggering alongside the regular infantry.

There are exceptions. I see many examples of mature and emerging social enterprises, neighbourhood groups and development trusts holding on and developing innovative approaches to social issues. We’re also seeing people band together to tackle immediate threats, whether it’s the closure of a library or a public service, the loss of employment or removal of opportunities. A new wave of community activists is emerging, savvy with social media and able to network and make their presence felt.

You could call this the big society, and in one sense you’d be right. But it is a hard-pressed society that is often not big enough to work beyond its immediate boundaries or objectives. Meanwhile other parts of society are not holding on.

Without the cavalry, though, we have only our own resources. And while they are stretched, they are still significant: the UK remains one of the world’s wealthier nations, with infrastructure that generally works and an economy that is still substantial.

It’s time to apply those resources intelligently. In a world where we have to be more self-reliant, it’s more important than ever that we are not only self-reliant but find ways to help each other. You could call it the big society. You could call it cooperation. I prefer the concept of solidarity, because it is about people coming together from shared experiences and hopes rather than out of a sense of duty or philanthropy. Whatever we call it, though, we need to get on with it. The time for jockeying for position is over.

• Picture by Angus McBride

The road to responsibility starts when we stop hounding the poor

2011-06-23T09:06:00.000+01:00

People-centred regeneration

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Sir Robin Wales, Mayor of Newham and a man who should probably know better, had plenty to say at the Chartered Institute of Housing conference on Wednesday. Among his more challenging remarks was his view that people in work should be given priority for social housing as a way of creating stable communities.

That’s quite a contrast with a recent research project led by Professor Ian Cole of Sheffield Hallam University, which found social housing was especially valued by those on the margins of the labour market: ‘Neighbourhoods with higher proportions of social housing offered stability for residents where jobs were short-lived and insecure and recurrent poverty was a constant threat.’

The areas studied included the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates in west London, where residents want to take over their council homes - just the sort of responsible civic action a government committed to localism and the ‘big society’ might want to encourage. The only difficulty, as I’ve observed elsewhere, is that Hammersmith and Fulham council sees these estates as a huge development opportunity.

As the West Kensington and Gibbs Green residents have pointed out, the theory of massive redevelopment with the benefits of speculation and rising property values eventually trickling down to the poor is typical of the approaches that got us into our economic mess - and, as I explained in more detail in evidence to a parliamentary select committee recently, it’s an approach that is largely obsolete on commercial as well as ethical grounds.

What brings the observations of Robin Wales, the findings of Ian Cole’s research team and the struggles of west London residents together is the contested but vital idea of home and community. The more committed people are to their homes - the buildings, neighbourhoods, friends and communities of interest they inhabit - the more likely they are to look out for each other as well as themselves. Policies and initiatives that increase insecurity militate against this, making people defensive and suspicious.

Politicians and policymakers far too easily swallow the tabloid myth that the poor need to be hounded and bullied into responsibility. It’s a poisonous rhetoric that too easily takes hold in difficult times, when people tend to look for scapegoats. As Ian Cole’s research has found, people in the poorest areas aren’t that different from the rest of us, in that they usually try to do the right thing in difficult circumstances. And like the rest of us, sometimes it doesn’t work. Failing doesn’t make a person a failure.

I was also at the Chartered Institute of Housing event on Wednesday, arguing in a fringe meeting organised by the think tank Res Publica for people-centred regeneration - an approach that starts by appreciating and valuing local people’s skills and relationships, and works with the grain in order to widen those skills and relationships. Jon Fitzmaurice and Euan Mills gave splendid examples of this from their work with Self-Help Housing and in Chatsworth Road, Hackney (my slides are above).

If we don’t grasp this now, we may never do. We need to use our current economic and environmental crisis to fashion a new social contract that recognises that civic behaviour arises when we allow people in our poorest communities to start fashioning policy from their own enterprise and neighbourliness. The job of government is to support and facilitate that, not to hurl a succession of policies from on high like Jove's thunderbolts.

Saving our forests is a responsibility, not just a demand

2011-06-20T17:42:00.000+01:00

Seeing the wood for the trees

One of the ironies of the government’s review of woodlands is the number of trees that may have to be pulped in order to print out everyone’s responses. Given that one of the concerns expressed in the recent natural environment white paper is to increase tree cover in England and Wales, this is a little unfortunate.

We should all hope and pray that the paper comes from sustainable sources - or, better still, that responses are submitted electronically. But the real issue is that while we’ve been good at telling the government how important woodlands are to us, we’ve been less clever at expressing why they are valuable and how best to keep and increase that value in the future.

At one end of the scale is the case that woodlands must be public simply because they are a much-loved amenity - an argument with deep cultural roots in principles of common good and public access, but without necessarily acknowledging the values of common responsibility that should go alongside them (we tend to assume it’s the government’s job but dislike the way the government does it). At the opposite end of the spectrum, others insist on framing the argument in economic terms alone, falling into the common trap of acting as if the only way to justify an expense is by calculating the gross value added or the cost savings to the public purse.

These arguments are being revisited as the government’s independent panel on forestry swings into action. The panel’s ‘call for views’ casts the net widely - respondents are asked to provide four succinct pages answering the following questions:

what do forests and woods mean to you?
what is your vision for the future of England’s forests and woods?
what do you feel to be the benefits for forests and woods to (a) you personally; (b) society as a whole; (c) the natural environment; and (d) the economy?
The panel also asks for views on ‘practical solutions and good practice’ and the ‘priorities and challenges for policy’.

Answers, as they say, on a postcard. You’ve got till 31 July to respond.

The responses are already coming in. Last week a new group, Our Forests, was launched to pick up where the public campaign against the government’s aborted plans to sell Forestry Commission land left off. Interestingly, its first action was to challenge the independence and principles of the review panel.

Meanwhile the think tank Res Publica, supported by the Woodland Trust, set out the economic arguments for valuing and enhancing our woodlands.

I’ve been working with The Mersey Forest, the largest of England’s community woodlands, to identify the key issues the review should consider. The result is a briefing (above) making the case for forestry to benefit community, commerce and climate and warning of the risks of 'peak wood'.

The vital thing here is that forests are not just a service or amenity to be provided and consumed. The key to a healthy future for forests and woodlands is the same as the key to healthy places, communities and economies - to recognise our interdependence and role as custodians of place and landscape for future generations. Get that right and the economic value and public benefits follow; fail and we lose far more than access and enjoyment.

Why are the poor always with us?

2011-06-12T19:25:00.000+01:00

The recent BBC documentary, Poor Kids, has got a lot of people talking. It’s excellent that it’s raised awareness of the poverty that exists among us at a time when that poverty is likely to worsen as a result of economic circumstances and government policies.

Mike Chitty’s excellent post on Poor Kids in Leeds starts to bring the issue home (and if you haven’t read it, please do so - it’s one of the best things I’ve seen this weekend).

One point from Mike’s post struck me: the response he noted from many, which is that ‘the poor will always be with us’. It’s a kind of ‘c’est la vie’ shrug, an acknowledgement that this is terrible, but what can little ol’ me do?

The quote (or misquote) is of course taken from the Bible. But many people don’t understand the context, so it’s worth a quick detour.

The story, as told by the gospel writer Matthew, is that Jesus’ followers were aghast when a woman poured an expensive bottle of perfume over their rabbi (breaking any number of cultural taboos in the process). Why, they asked, wasn’t it sold and the money given to the poor?

The response was: ‘You will always have the poor with you, but you won’t always have me.’ It wasn’t a way of saying the poor don’t matter. It was, among other things, a challenge to the hypocrisy of people who are quick to condemn others’ ‘waste’ but have the opportunity to do something about poverty all the time, and don’t.

‘The poor are always with you’ remains a challenge to all who decide, for good reasons or bad, that poverty is someone else’s responsibility. Of course we might have less poverty if we had better governments - but who chooses the governments? We might have less poverty if businesses were less rapacious - but who chooses which businesses to support? We might have less poverty if we saw poor people as human beings rather than statistics and problems - but who chooses poor people as their friends?

When push comes to shove, I don’t think the underlying reasons why the poor are always with us have changed that much. One difference is that most of us now know that we are wealthy enough for poverty, in Leeds or in Lagos, to be unnecessary.

Mike’s response to his own post about poor kids in Leeds is the right one - what are we going to do about it?

For me - and I direct these comments to myself as much as anyone else - one of the main reasons the poor are always with us is that we are so seldom with them. It is very easy not to be with them. We have developed separate ways of living in the UK that partition the well-off from the struggling. It’s not hard to be surprised and shocked by poverty when we don’t walk the same streets, use the same shops or travel on the same buses.

It’s easy, too, to tell ourselves stories about the poor that excuse us from doing anything - stories that they’re lazy or scrounging (it’s their own fault) or that they’re victims of injustice (it’s the government’s fault, not ours) or that they’re just unlucky (nobody’s fault, and maybe they’ll get lucky again).

What is the answer to these stories that become excuses? It has to lie in connections - in finding ways to build bridges that can turn into relationships. And that bridge building has to be respectful, not patronising, which can only happen when you start getting to know people as people and not as amorphous lumps of society or recipients of distant charity.

If we can start finding ways of getting to know more poor people, we might find ourselves socialising, spending and voting in ways that will mean fewer poor kids.

Why smart cities need smart stories

2011-06-10T13:37:00.000+01:00

If the people of Manchester had been told they might each live seven months longer if they voted for congestion charging, might the 2008 vote have gone a different way?

Yes, we all love our cars and doubtless feel they improve the quality of our lives no end - which of course they do in the short term. But if we knew the trade-off between immediate convenience and life expectancy, would we think differently about where and when we use them?

The experience of Stockholm, I was told this week, is that congestion charging had indeed increased life expectancy in the Swedish capital by seven months (I’m trying to source the papers on this, but a study in London also revealed some improvement). But often the simple messages get lost in the tangle of arguments about what’s good or bad for business, the pros and cons of public transport, or the lobbying of different interest groups.

Or, bringing the question of our choices closer to home, why is it so difficult to persuade teenage girls to walk to school? I was told of one school that struggled with this for months, providing every incentive it could think of - until it asked the girls themselves. Their response? ‘If I walk to school, my hair will be ruined.’ So the school provided a room where they could preen themselves on arrival, and - astonishingly - the kids started to walk.

Both these stories came up in a discussion earlier this week on smart cities, hosted by Wood Holmes (I blogged about the first of these events last year). The gathering, at Greenhouse Leeds, brought together people involved in technology, utilities, academia and local government - as well as interested people who just ‘do stuff’.

I was fascinated to find a strong link with my talk the previous day on JFDI urbanism. What the two have in common is that, whether our solutions are high-tech or low-tech, what makes them work is human scale and human understanding. People need to grasp the relevance and the connection with their lives.

As one participant put it: ‘Everyone gets it. The problem is people are trying to systemetise and grand plan it.’

This is what localism needs to be about - making things personal and real. It’s why, for example, BT fails to understand rural broadband (despite winning contract after contract) but people who live in rural villages do (as demonstrated by the world-first live-streaming of a village cricket match organised by John Popham).

Yes, smart cities are about new technologies and uses of data, about making information available and applying and visualising it in ways that some of us find jaw-droppingly awesome (see for example the visualisation above of pictures taken by locals and tourists in Vancouver - by Eric Fischer, via Yuri Artibise).

But really, smart cities are about people and human understanding. They are about connecting with people, not just connecting with technology. And that’s why we need to get our heads around them.

How to create places for people - the JFDI way

2011-06-08T12:05:00.000+01:00

Six signposts to JFDI urbanism

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If you weren’t being paid to do it, what would you really care about doing? It was a question I posed to a group of architects and urbanists yesterday at the first of the Orangery Academy events in Wakefield. The answers were revealing.

Most people said they wanted to help people interact and engage with each other. Some phrased that in terms of safety and dealing with crime; others talked about connecting up online and face to face conversations and interests; some spoke of using places and buildings to help people meet and share.

Many of the participants were highly qualified professionals with years of expertise in the built environment. Yet their concerns could have been voiced in remarkably similar language by people in all walks of life, from politicians and policymakers to pensioners or pub landlords.

Professionals often pay lipservice to the idea that good placemaking is all about people. But our discussion revealed that when you peel back the professional wrapping, it's people we really care about. We might all sympathise with Sartre’s dictum that hell is other people from time to time, but few of us would choose to be without them.

That’s one reason why I think the end of big government regeneration programmes offers an opportunity as well as the real and obvious threats. The opportunity is for what I call JFDI urbanism - just have fun and do it. It means working small, engaging at a human level, building networks and coalitions around the things people care about - doing what Nabeel Hamdi calls ‘trickling up’ rather than assuming wealth will trickle down from grand plans and big developments.

It means thinking of cities and towns as living organisms that respond to multiple movements and interventions, not as machines to be fixed or even as puzzles to be solved. As former RIBA president George Ferguson, who followed my workshop with an account of his experiences in Bristol and an analysis of why Stokes Croft works as a community (think low tech, enterprising in the true sense, ready to muck in), put it: ‘If we can make our places good for kids we make them good for all of us.’

So what might JFDI urbanism look like? The slideshow has a few suggestions. Feel free to add your own.

A lesson on living with constraints

2011-05-27T08:58:00.000+01:00

We all love it, but do we need a message with a bit more humility?

The less governments do, or the more unpopular the things they do, the more they tend to adopt the tone and rhetoric of liberating armies rescuing an oppressed population from years of tyranny.

At the same time, their opponents resort to ever shallower critiques - focus on the foibles and gaffes of the individuals you oppose and hope nobody will notice the incoherence of your own arguments.

Very few in the political or professional worlds have the courage to say what we all know: life is messy, our attempts to create order and sense are imperfect, and progress is hard won and even harder to sustain.

So it’s been refreshing to read Nabeel Hamdi’s recent book, The Placemaker’s Guide to Building Community. Professor Hamdi’s experience is not in creating ‘iconic’ architecture or shopping centres for the well-heeled but in working with slum-dwellers, people in shanty towns and those displaced by economic or natural disasters (and I’d include a global economy that leaves millions of people living on less than a dollar a day and with no secure livelihood, home, health or family a continuing disaster).

Hamdi spends a lot of time talking about how to work with people on the margins of society to help them secure real improvements in their lives. All of it is about negotiation and compromise, and a lot of it is about scale and timing. The following passage struck me as particularly relevant to the wider debates taking place in the UK and elsewhere about community, place and society:

‘...I tend to assume that many of the constraints we confront in the mess of practice are a context for work rather than a barrier to it. While I may not accept that context to be legitimate or morally acceptable, and while in the longer term I will know that the context itself is one of the primary causes of many of the problems that will need tackling, it is, nevertheless, my starting point. I accept, for now, that some of these constraints will remain unresolved. In the interests of my own self-care I will have to change my expectation of how much I can achieve. This determines how much I can do today, how far I can go and where I can start. One only need observe the creativity of many of the poorest, to wonder at their ability to manoeuvre within the appalling constraints imposed by poverty, to realise that this first axiom of practice has value.

Second, I measure my progress and success in my ability to open doors to get things going and then the entrepreneurship that it takes to keep it going - and not in the requisite quite often of my sponsors to “deliver” on projects. In other words, I seek to find an intervention, however small, which can serve as a catalyst for achieving longer term more strategic objectives…’

Understanding context is an undervalued skill. Opening doors may not sound very exciting when people prefer to talk about change and transformation, but is much more helpful than the easy inspiration offered by speechwriters and PR gurus.

Hamdi prefaces the section I quoted with this comment:

'Performance in the mess and uncertainty of everyday demand that we befriend ambiguity. Ambiguity and uncertainty guard against error. They encourage enquiry and therefore a deeper understanding...'

That uncertainty and the humility that goes with it are the qualities we should look for in real leaders - not their ability to trumpet resounding but ultimately hollow visions and missions.